SatyQ's Tutorial on Coloring Shaded Pencil Work in PhotoShop

OK, I'm probably going to do lousy at explaining this, but everyone seems to be curious about how I did that Shadowcat pic so here we go! (Image File sqcshadowcat2.jpg)

Step One: Draw your pencils fully shaded and detailed (gee that's a pretty simple first step!) - this one took me probably 2 hours (with a photographic example pic - I can't pull shade tones like THAT straight out of my head!) uninterrupted- graphite stick on 11" x 14" 2 ply bristol board. I'm probably slower than that now.

Step Two: OK, once the pic is drawn and scanned (a feat in and of itself!) I opened it up in Adobe Photoshop 6.0 and made a new layer over the top of the background layer and set the layer options to Multiply. Then, using the polygonal lasso tool, I outlined all of the flesh areas of the picture, picked out a peachy color from the palette, and filled the area with my color of choice. This is what it looks like now.... (please note the fill is done on layer 2, not on the original scanned pic's layer!)

Step Three: Now, going back to the background layer, with the skin areas still hilighted, I pick out the airbrush tool set to an extremely large brush size (300) and the mode of the brush set to Color. I made a few passes over the skin tone areas and the background greys take on the color of the brush (while still retaining the original modeling of the pic). This is how it looks now. Remember there are 2 layers, both with the same color on them at this point.

Step Four: With the skin areas still highlighted on the beginning layer I now go to image/adjust/selective color and pick "whites" from the colors menu. I turned the Cyans down to -100 and the Yellows and Whites both up +50. This is what it looks like now.

Step Five: The skin area is still selected. Now I go back to the second layer and select the burn tool with a large brush (I started off with size 100). I modeled the skin tones and changed out brush sizes as needed to accomplish the modeling effects. This is what the second layer looks like now, with the bottom layer "turned off" so you can see what I've done on the second layer at this point.

Step Six: Here is the same pic only with both layers showing, so that you can see how the layers are working with each other at this point.

Step Seven:

hmmm... oops! Remember that part where I said I went and adjusted the selective color on the whites? That wasn't where I did it (I think I went and saved the same pic 2x there) - this is! (Arg I should have written this down as I was doing it I knew that saved pic didn't look quite right for that technique) I also changed the mode of the second layer from Multiply to Color and changed the opaqueness to 57%. This is the end result. I'm done with the skin tones at this point and would then move on to another part of the piece (except I'm too intimidated by that water spout to attempt finishing this pic at this time!). Hope that enlightens y'all on how I got from point a to point g!

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Image and text provided by SatyQ. HTML format by Bic and touched up by Imaginos :P.

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