Colour you line work fast!

1. Forbidden Colouring teshniques: Hi there. I'm back an animator and production artist. In this lesson, we're going to go over the easiest and quickest ways that you can lay down a flat color section of your illustration and discuss wishes the best way for your style I'm going for. This is especially helpful if you find yourself burning out, painting the flats by hand. If that sounds like fun to you, and I'll see you in the next one. 2. Types of lines: Now I thought I would start off with this image here that I haven't Photoshop, ghastly ride on his spectral steed. This file will be linked below in the project description, but you can use your own work if you like. This is by the way, part of a tabletop RPG that I'm putting it together. So watch this space. So here we have the sketch layer and you can ink and refine the sketch any way you want to. But I have a couple that I prepared. This style is done with a pencil style brush. And I love this one as you get this nice, sort of rough texture that stops it from looking a little bit too artificial. And as you can see, it leaves the cell slightly inconsistent lines, but it's because of that. It stops it from looking a little, a little too heavy, too harsh. And then on this section we have the other inking style. She's a pen style brush, which has a lot stronger lines, but they're a little less elegant than the pencil brush. But if you zoom in, you can see they're not perfect. Pencil tools, lines. They do have a slight texture to them, makes them a little jacket. And I like that because again, I'm personally a big fan of this per pixel perfect Super Black, super fine edge pens or brushes in Photoshop or Procreate. But no matter what brush you use to make your illustrations, more or less going to fall into these two categories. Either a sharp, crisp line or more of a slightly rough, but it's slightly more delicate, slightly more elegant line. And there are different methods of coloring to see each version. But before we go into those methods, I'm going to do a quick diversion now, just this show a super quick, super dirty way that you can color it in flats. 3. Lasoo tool: When I was working as a storyboard artist, that supermassive gains on the kings the query, I was making about 25 boards a day, but I still wanted the characters to stand out against the background and filling out the character by hand would've been impossible. So embraced the dark art of using the Lasso tool. Now, this may feel a bit extreme, but I'm going to show with the sketch layer how you can use it, especially if you want to get these very quick fills. And then a nice gradient here against a background that you can then blur out. Then that way you get this nice foreground background really quick, really easy. So ticked sketch layer, then new layer. Make sure that's underneath the sketch layer. And then there's the last sue tool. I'm just going to go around the edge, really not being super precious with where the line goes. Again, this is something which can be a little intimidating to people because you're using this pixel thick line. But I think as long as you go at it, I relaxed, pace and know when to just hold down shift to add a section. If you feel like you're stuck to run out of steam, it's all good and just following the line as close as I can, but I'm not getting super stressed out about following it exactly, especially as this is quite a loose sketch. Anyway, what's more important is that we get the shape of what's going on rather than the exact dimensions. And if you do make us languish mistake, you can either hold down shift to add to that selection. Just to take away from him. Around here, I can feel myself getting to the edge here. So I'm just going to link it back to them a bit there. Easy-peasy. And again, holding down the Shift to add another shape. The sword here. At the top here, yourself, a bit of a break. So it's going to go there again. It's can hold Shift, mouse. And you probably notice there are a few little bits which are being taken up, but to be taken out. But again, super-easy, Just hold down Alt and then we can just carve out with the selection here. Yeah. Just just gently going back over some of these more Regis parts. Nothing too crazy. There we go. So you've got the shape here sorted out. So I'm going to right-click on Paint tool, the gradient tool, that nice gradient here. Look at that. Look how quickly you've done this. A bit nice. Yeah, and yeah, it doesn't fit perfectly. That doesn't really matter because you can go to the sketch layer here, right-click it, then go down to Create Clipping mask. And here we go, it will clip over the shape, then showing more or less what I would do when doing my storyboard work. Let's get ourselves big, big painterly brush it pasty down. Below the background here. Super-quick, super hazy clouds. Make it darker. Foreground with the clouds. And again here, grassy area. Quick, super easy. It's printed the flow and pasty do a narrow tree. Because like I said, I was doing 25 boards a day, hundreds per month. You can't really wasted time doing stuff that's finicky, that's super detail. And then let's give it a little blur. Background and foreground layer on top to give us a little more, Let's go super dark. Just do like a bush like shape here. Being super messy because the figure here in the middle is taken up all the attention. So all you need is the kind of suggestion of shape in the foreground and background. That up then suddenly real nicely. It's my soul ramp here. So if Britain until again radial one, set this to overlay 25%. There you go. Got a pretty quick sketch, pretty quick and easy image here, that'd be good enough for a storyboard. And it took us a couple of minutes, took us hardly any time at all to fill in this main is main character. And then if you have a little bit more time, Let's layer above the sketch layer. Sharepoint is one. Then going back to my pencil tool, CISC, do some edge highlighting just to give it some special, just dragging it across. B is referencing one because again, because it's set to clipping mask, it will never go outside of this layer. So you can get these quite nice, quite delicate lines. And there you go. We have in black-and-white, more or less a full illustration and took his hardly any time at all. So let's go to a little less slap dash, but no less quick methods of coloring, fine line illustration. 4. The magic of magic wand: Now the sketch line and the structure. Now, you could use the last sue tool if you have patients, but I find that as long as the lines are closed, there are no gaps in the line work. You don't need to do that. Another thing that you do need to do is a lot of people find themselves stuck doing. It's getting new layer. And then with our old friend, the hard round going in and having to go over the entire thing by bit, like a spike by spike. And then clean up the dam. And then get so annoyed and tired at the end of it. They have the energy for the receiving administration. But who has time for that? Not me. That's for sure. So a lot of working as an artist or just like practicing our urine if it's a hobby, is about managing your energy and monotonously painting every single thing, it's going to snap your energy super-fast. So what I find is that if you have your line work and then as I said, very carefully gone over the areas which may cause you trouble. She looked like them and they'll be close, just taking a little time, then what you can do, a super quick method, which works for basically almost all my styles. You get Magic Wand Tool, select the outside. Then let's make sure we select all the insights. Again, holding Shift, add bits here. Down here, I click on the actual line work. So now we have the entire figure selected. What you've been wanting to do then is go up to Select, then you want to get them modify when the gate to expand. Now, I usually expand by about two pixels. Click, Okay, and then another step you can do. You don't have to do this, but you can if you want backups and select go to modify, go to smooth, and then students but to pixels, this will smooth out your selection. So when it's first selected, the outside, it'll be quite jagged. But as you can see, because we've expanded the selection, it's no longer sitting outside of a line, actually inside the light, then all we need to do is go select it, right-click when you have matching tool, select Inverse, make a new layer, drag it below the line up, and then just paint bucket, fill it. There we go. Simple as that. Easy. So I wanted to just quickly show you this is what it would look like if I did not do those Select Modify steps. So let's inverse. So this doesn't look too bad. The outside here, if we were to do a very quick and dirty, just wants you to get something out there. As you can see, that these quite jagged edges that which on closer inspection can look a little undesirable. That's why I like to have the edge of the fill in the size, the line rather than just sitting around it. And then a trick you can do if you're finding that you'd like to use these more gentle pencil lines. They can sometimes look a little anemic. They can look a little weak. And what you want is to have a line which really shows depth and shows, wait. What you can do to alleviate that is just to take the lineup layer, drag it down to here, duplicate it. Now we've got this really heavy lying all over now I don't really want that. Well, I don't personally, if you'd like this, you do you will. I'm going to do is I'm going to press this button here to add a mask, then with a soft round, setting it to black and making it reasonably large. One I'm going to do is just eat away at the top. Because between this and the mask we can, I might add it back in if we say wish. And just over where the light hits, I'm just going to erase away some of these more heavier lines. And then that will give the drawing a much more balanced look. That still has a lot of character, still has a lot of your own personal style. Because your style doesn't come from endlessly agonizing over what kind of artwork you're going to make. Your stove comes from you. It comes from the tiny differences in your hand muscles. It comes from your experiences, how, how, where you grew up. It comes from your priorities. That's why even if you were to coffee this illustration that exactly It's still wouldn't look like mine. It would look like yours. And it's those little decisions that really determine what the final illustration is going to look like. There we go, he's already looking a little more significant. He is looking a little heavier in the shadows. See I can click off this layer and show you the difference between the two 0s here really. And again, we did not spend ages, natures, natures carrying through each one of these little tendrils and spikes curves. We managed to achieve this in record time. Now what we call the energy to continue doing the leg here, make the clipping mask. Let's start just walking in some color. But we still want the energy to do this. We still feel good. It's all good. It's quick and fast and getting in your results you want. But there's an even quicker, even easier way to put your flats and none of the curve at that. In the next video. 5. Secret Bucket Fill mehod: So here we have our heavy line illustration. Now, it wants its color. This, we could just go straight in like a complete psychopath, but we're not gonna do that, but we aren't going to do next best thing. So this is a really neat trick and we could do the same method as I showed last time, where we do the outward selections, select New Layer, New Layer, and then just fill look how quick that was. Good grief. But I find if you're doing quite bold, quite simple and cartoony illustrations with a nice hard thick line. There is another method. So you go new layer underneath, go back to our old friend, the pink bucket. Now, you want to make sure that this button here, all layers is clicked. This is the magic sauce for willing to be doing max. So let's just stop filling. So we're on the layer below. But because we have all selected, you can now fill in each section as you go. And as I said, if you're doing very kind of animation style, comic book illustrations, this is an absolute game changer because you can very quickly just block in the colors that you want. And again, think about how much time this would have taken if we had been coloring, bit pipe it, going around every single section with the panel, the paint paintbrush tool. This only took us a couple of seconds, literally seconds. And now I can very quickly start adding in these where I want. And I might change these a little bit later. It doesn't really matter because this is getting so quickly that I now have the energy to do what I need to with this illustration. And this is a fun thing, so let's just make the line on visible. This is what it looks like underneath. Just kinda groovy. I kinda like this. So all of these layers are separated. So you can easily just go in and change them without affecting the rest of the area. And then we want to do special effects and stuff like that, just doing the layer clipping mask and make sure that the flats, and then if we want to add some texture to this really dark red, we can just do that. Little, bloody little scary. Again, your gradient tool, radial. Have ourselves a nice gradients and let's overlay, bring the opacity down. Yeah, it looks great. This took us hardly any time at home. Now, you may be thinking, could I do this with the pencil? The answer is a qualified yes. Server that's doing the layer below its paint bucket. So you can do this method, but I wouldn't recommend it myself. You may get some results to you are not totally keen on, and especially it's good for big areas like this. But when you get into the nitty gritty little details, it can be a little cumbersome. And again, because looking at the fill layer we have here, you can see the edges are a little jagged and you can find that the fill doesn't go all the way up to the end. You can change this by going up here to tolerance. So the higher the tolerance, the more dense a section of the Canvas needs to be before it will stop pink bracket. So e.g. let's go straight on the line. If we do a very high tolerance, say 60, see it's starting to eat through to and the other curves you can more easily see that. As you can see, it's starting to obliterate. The final parts of the illustration. I find that parts of the line work. It's, it's Control Z to get that away for us if we lower the tolerance, ten, you can see it's stopped a lot earlier, but you get these kind of inconsistent bits here and there. But that's not to say that you shouldn't try it and haven't experiments have give it a go. You never know what you might find. And hey, you may find that this kind of style of coloring really works for you. I'm not going to tell you not to do it. You shouldn't let anyone else either. It's just finished the teeth. It's sold, something else you can do. That's pretty cool with this method. Because as I showed you earlier, this layer is separate from the line up and get rid of it. Let's bring the lightness all the way down with command you. How cool is that? I want a t-shirt and actually this kind of jacket, slightly, slightly messy line, kinda cool, not going to lie. But the important thing is that no matter which method we use, we're saving time. We're using what you could call hack to make our illustration go a lot quicker. And when you make these kind of boring but necessary parts of making illustration go a little quicker, little easier than you'll find. You'll have a lot more energy for the rest of the illustration. This is especially true if you're doing comic book projects where you have to do the flats for lots and lots and lots of characters and panels and objects and things like that. But these methods can really speed that process up. And sometimes it just means that you need to mix and match which method you use for the most optimal outcome for each section of the comment. There we have it. We've gone over the fast and easy ways to color your illustration. I really hope that you found these methods useful. Now have a lot of time and energy for your art. If you've enjoyed this video, nice comment like in the review, would be absolutely appreciated. If you'd like to see more of these videos, please subscribe to me. And if you really want to help me out, then if you can reference me, is the reason why you wanted to subscribe to Skillshare. That will be absolutely brilliant. Also, when you've completed this course and you have some rocks or show off, please put them in the comments. I love seeing people's work. Also, if you have some questions on illustration or digital arts, or you'd like me to review your book, please don't hesitate to send me a message. I'll be sure to get back to you as soon as you can, but until next time, I'll see you in the next one.