tutorials

This tutorial is fairly short and should be compatible with all versions of photoshop.

There are many techniques out there that you can adopt to color and draw. This tutorial only demonstrates the techniques That’s QT Designs has used and the basics for the curious visitor. So enjoy~!

Start things off with a new file (any dimension).

To begin we will need a base image, which will be used as the guideline to what you want to draw and color in the end.

Create a new layer, name it base image.

Use the Pencil Tool or Paintbrush Tool to draw your image onto the canvas.

Alternativly, you can use a scanned image as the base image.

Set the opacity of the ‘base image’ to 50%, then create a new layer called trace. Use the Line tool to trace over the lines of the base image.

Once the trace is completed set the base image to invisible and the drawing should look cleaner than before.

The next thing to do is to color the image in. In your trace, select any part of your image use the Magic Wand Tool to select the area you would like to color.

Alternatively, you can use the Polygon Lasso Tool to select the area you with to color.

Assuming that the color of your choice is already selected, create a new layers and use the Paint Bucket Tool to color the selected area of your choice.

Set the layer opacity to 60% and name the layer color1.

For this tutorial, the color layers in each step has been set to invisible. It isn’t usually necessary, but this was done so that each step and progress would be easier to follow.

Following that, layers should be created with layer settings set to Multiply to create shadow, depth and outline.

The Gradient, Airbrush and Paintbrush tools could be used to achive those effects.

Once all these layers, were set to visible, the image will appear much darker.

Another relatively simple color effect that will be discussed in this tutorial is the use of background images, which can be applied to color clothing.

For this tutorial, a simple stripe pattern was created. Then most of the pattern excluding the top was cut away. Leaving the character with a stripped patterned top.

After that, all there is left to do is basically repeat the same techniques over and over again until the entire image is colored.

This was the end result. Not perfect, but hopefully it has to served it’s purpose.

I hope that this tutorial has been insightful to how relatively simple drawing and coloring an image in Photoshop can be.