This is a colouring tutorial on how I coloured this image, sketched by Zurdom and inked by Bill Meiggs. This tutorial is just one of the ways I use to colour. This is not necessarily the easiest or most effecient way to colour, so keep practicing until you find your own way, and trust me when I say that there are a lot of great tutorials online by other colourists!
Fig.01
This tutorial is done with the assumption that you know how to prepare your line art for colouring. (Fig.01)
In this case I put the line art on its own layer and set it to MULTIPLY in the layers window, as shown below.(Fig.02)
Fig.02
This will make the line art layer transparent without losing the lines, so you can colour freely without worrying about going over a line.(Fig.03)
Fig.03
Next comes probably the most frustrating part of colouring any image: the flats. Here I just lay down mid tones of the final colours, although that doesn’t mean I can’t change them later.
To do flats I create a new layer (in this case I created 5 layers - one for each object and I’ll explain why later!).
With my Lasso tool ,(Fig.4) with following settings (Fig.05),
Fig.04
Fig.05
I go about selecting and colouring the flat colours of each layer/object.
Here it’s important to keep the lines tight, often I’ll go over an object already coloured and then deselect it with the wand tool at 1 tolerance so that the lines meet up flush.
Now this is where it comes in handy having done each object on its own layer!
1. I create a new layer over the flats layer of any one of the objects
2. I turn the layer into a mask layer by pressing the ALT button and moving my cursor between the two layers until the icon changes. Your layers should look as follows (Fig.06):
