pendako beginner's CG tutorial

This tutorial uses Photoshop 6 and a scanner.
You must know basics of photoshop such as color picking, creating layers, etc which can be learned through the Help menu.

 

Welcome to naska's tutorial of doom...I mean beginner's tutorial. Here you will learn how your friendly neighborhood eggplant creates CGs, woohoo~! OK, I need sleep. SCANNING Here's a sketch I did for a jam that I decided to use for this tutorial. I scanned the image at the modes flatbed (reflective), 300 dpi, grayscale / B&W photo, at 100%. I scan it at a high resolution so that it looks good printed. You should normally shrink it down to 72 dpi for the web after you finish coloring your image.

CLEANING Whether your image is inked or a sketch you'd probably have to clean it up. Goto Image - adjust - levels and fiddle around with the triangles you see under the graph. Pull in the triangle on the right to make the background whiter and the left-most one to make the darks darker. When things look good click OK. If things look dirty zoom into the image and clean it up by using the paintbrush tool. Here I wanted to leave a sketchy feel so I used a fuzzy airbrush and paintbrush to erase only the lines that were distracting. If this is for print I would have inked the image or have turned the image into vector and probably have ended up jumping out of the window since I don't have the patience for it. Don't worry, I live on the first floor. (long silence)

 

SEPARATING THE LINEART TO A NEW LAYER This allows you to modify the line art easily. First click on the channels tab and click on "load channel as selection" (1) You've now selected all the white in the image. To select all the line-art you want to inverse your selection - select everything that's not white. Goto select - inverse (2) Now that you have your lineart selected create a new layer and fill the new layer with 100% Black by going to Edit - Fill. Now you have a transparent layer with just your lineart on it (3) All you have to do now is to create new layers underneath the line art layer and apply color to them!

HOW LAYERS WORK Layers work kind of like cels used in classical animation. The line-art goes on top, the colors are painted under the line art on the other side of the film and the background is on the bottom. Keep the line art on top and create as many layers as you need (more like how many your computer lets you since it eats up memory) between the lineart and the background layer.

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All artworks on this site are property of John Kim and Naska Chijoue (unless stated otherwise) and may NOT be used for private or commercial purposes.
Beginnger's tutorial is copyright of www.pendako.com.