Behind the Scenes: Lulu

For this week's blog post, I decided I'm going to talk a bit about my process for colorizing my pictures.

The first step is of course the sketch itself.  There's no wrong or right way to do a sketch.  That's all up to the artist and how much additional prep work they may want to do before coloring.  I try to draw a fairly clean sketch so there's less clean up to do when I scan it.  Some artists might choose to draw in blue pencil and go over it with ink or a dark pencil.  Some prefer to do a rough sketch and trace over it in ink using a lightbox or even digitally in Photoshop or GIMP or other art software. 

Lulu sketch digitally modified

To the right is the scanned sketch.  Both for sake of visibility and general cleanliness, I always adjust the image's color levels before I upload it anywhere (it makes the blacks blacker and the lights lighter; useful for removing most leftover smudges and pencil marks).  If you draw on standard letter-size/printer paper, you'll be able to scan in your work with one pass.  However, if you draw on anything bigger than that (this sketch was done on 11"x14" paper), you'll have to scan your image in 2 or more halves and digitally stitch them together.  It's not as complex as it sounds.  Pretty seamless if you're only dealing with 2 pieces.  More than 2 and it gets just a bit more difficult, but still not too bad.  

The next step after scanning in the image is to separate the line art from the background.  This is so that the black lines will stay on top of everything (think of the line art as the icing on a cake).  Which software you're using determines how easily that can be done.  There's more than one method to separate line art.  Just a matter of which you prefer.

Now that my line art has been separated, I'm going to keep it as the first layer and set the layer type to Multiply.  From there I start creating different layers.  There's no rules for how many layers you can or should have, but more layers usually means a bigger file size and more CPU resources.  I combine elements on a layer where possible provided that they don't touch each other (you don't want your elements touching on the same layer as that can confuse you when coloring or making special adjustments).  For example, I have Lulu's hair on the same layer with her belts, and her dress's fur lining on the same layer with the floral designs on her sleeves.  I have all the dolls on their own layer, but I would not put the dolls on the same layer with her hair pins because those two elements are directly touching and would make coloring more difficult.

Lulu pic layers

My method for composing layers is flatting all the colors out first in their respective layers.  I do it either by using the lasso tool for precision or just painting broadly and erasing the overrun later.  When creating layers, always keep visibility in mind.  A layer higher up in the list will supersede everything beneath it and something low on the chain will not be able to be seen through the elements above it.  It all works very much like a cake, if you will.  

You can see I've started some of the actual coloring process.  There is no one good way to color.  As with everything I've mentioned, it's all about user preference.  Some kind of a graphics tablet with a pen is pretty much a must for doing any kind of coloring.  My tool of choice at this time is a Wacom Intuos5 Medium.  Coloring remains as a process that I am still far from being great in.  An artist's work is never done...