Comic art colouring

Digital art: the process.

Today I will show how I have done my digital art works for the theme of alternative southland.

First I draw on real paper with ink and dip pens if I make a mistake i can fix it later on the computer.

A scan of the physical drawing is shown above.

   I change the file from Bitmap to cmyk mode. Then I change the resolution to 300ppi.

This is because those settings are the publishing standard. I plan to publish these drawings in my book for the theme alternate Southland. My theme was Southland if it was a slice of life comic strip.

N

ext I isolate the black lines and get rid of the white.I do this by going to the channels tab and ctrl +click on the cmyk panel.this selects all the white in my comic. 

I make a new layer.

I inverse the selection using the select tab and click on Inverse.

Then I fill it with black by clicking alt= delete.

This isolates the line work and next I delte the background layer, the original drawing.

I do all this so that I can colour on a layer below the line art layer and the black lines are automatically on top.

This is what it looks like after the above steps, just the lines and nothing else.

 Then I make a new layer at the bottom and fill it with white. 
then I erase any smudges or mistakes in the lines. I use the brush tool and my cintiq pen to join up or thicken some of the lines, as this makes colouring easier.
Above is what it looks like after the above steps.

Colouring and Actions.

First I create short cuts.

I make f2 the shortcut for selecting the line art layer.

I make f3 the short cut for selecting the colouring layer.

I make f4 the short cut for expanding my selection by 2 pixels. 

I click on select, modify, expand, 2

But I record it so I only do it once!

When I colour I click w to get the magic wand tool, then I click f2 then f4 then f3.
Which expanded the selection so that there is no white between the colour and the ink line.
Then I make sure I have the right colour and click Alt +delete to fill it.
If I want shading I click B to get the brush and select a darker shade of the same colour and paint a bit of that underneath. That gives more dimension, especially to hair.

I also use the brush and the lasso tool for bits where the lines don't join up or if I decide to do some shadows or shading.

 Shown here is what the colour looks like when the line art layer is invisible. .

And this is the final product. To show my process this is the second page of the alternative southland story. It took me 5 hours to do the digital colouring.

This is the first page, it took me 9 hours to colour it as it was my first time following this process.

I learned this method of colouring comics from the below link


reference: https://zenpencils.com/blog/cartooning/colouring/