Tutorial: How to Color a Traditionally inked Page (Patreon)

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This is gonna be a pretty long one. It's not that it's complicated, there's just a lot of steps.

We start off with a penciled page~

This page was created on "Deleter B4 Manga paper" with a 0.5 lead mechanical pencil. We trace the layout from blown up thumbnails and measure out the frames with a cyan blue pencil. Jen draws Sulvain and Kate draws Raziol and the backgrounds. The background on the bottom has a printed out frame of a 3D modeled carriage in cyan blue. 3D models save a lot of time on figuring out structure and perspective, but the details still need to be added. 

We scan this page in and add the black frames by selecting them with the Rectangular Marquee Tool, then go to "Paths" and select "Make work Path from selection" on the bottom.

Then we chose a ink brush and select "Stoke Path with Brush" on the bottom to create the frames on another layer. 

Then select and drag the workpath into the trash.

Then we go back to the pencil page layer and select "Image-->Adjustments-->Hue/Saturation".

These are the settings we use to change the pencil layer color to cyan. Now it's ready to print!

Make sure the page is printing on the right size paper. We use another piece of Deleter B4 Manga paper.

When it's printed, the blue lines will look like a different shade, but it should be fine.

This is how it looks printed, after Jen inked it a little bit. 

Jen inks the characters with a "G-nib" and a "School Pen" and uses "Pilot ink". Then Kate inks the backgrounds with "Copic Multiliners".

Once inks are done, we scan them in. 

Here's a recent scanned page. Now we need to clean up the page and get rid of the blue lines.

To do this we go to "Image--->Adjustments---->Levels".

To clean up the image, toggle the white and black arrows below the graph. 

Now to get rid of the cyan lines. Go to "Image---> Adjustments--->Black & White"

Now take the triangle under "Cyans" and move it to the far right. This should get rid of the pencil lines almost completely. If there is still grey residue, try to get rid of it with levels. 

Now that we have a clean page, we need to separate the lineart from the white page.

Do do this we go to the "Channels" tab next to "Paths" and "Layers."  And select "Load Channel as Selection" at the bottom.

Then go to "Selection---> Inverse."

This will select just the lineart. Now create a new layer and fill the selection. Make a white layer below the lineart. 

Now lineart and background are separated.

And you can paint underneath the lineart layer.

You can also create a clipping mask above the lineart to change the lineart color.

We use this a lot for chaging line color and softening the appearance of lines.

Now onto coloring!

When there's a new scene Kate always needs to come up with a pallet. It can take a while depending on the scene. It's a lot of color selection, looking at animation and  illustrations for inspiration and toggling the colors in "Image--> Adjustments--> Color Balance". Once we've decided we send them in to be flatted. 

We always put the characters and objects on a separate layer from the BG. We often separate the background elements as well for easy coloring.

First we add highlights and shadows on the characters.

Then we go in the background and start adding shadows, details and highlights. 

We use clipping masks quite a lot on each element. It makes it easy not to go outside the lines. We also use a lot of watercolor brushes to get texture. 

On characters we add a blush layer and change the line color for wrinkles and fingernails. 

After the page is complete we need to add texture to the whole thing. First it's VERY IMPORTANT to save another file or else we won't be able to edit it later. Then, in the new file, we merge all the colored layers.

The colored layer should look like this. 

Duplicate the layer, transparency lock the layer and fill it with a light color. 

Then put this layer underneath the colored layer. 

Then, on the colored layer go to "Layer-->Layer Mask-->Hide all"

The page will end up looking like this. Now there is a black mask next to the color layer. Adding white will make the color show. So to create a texture, all we have to do is select a textured brush and paint white onto the black mask.

I usually choose a relatively opaque brush so that the colors will come through well.

Then just select the black mask and paint white.

It's best to try and do it in one go to avoid uneven "paint".

Voila! Textured color! 

Now we just resize in Clip Studio Paint to a template and add bubbles and sound effects.

And it's done!

Please let me know if you all have any questions or if you want me to elaborate on any steps. I know there are a lot, but once you get them down they're super easy. :)