Digital Method Tutorial

Alright- after a few requests I'm giving back and posting a tutorial on my methods.
This is the way that I typically work- it can be very time consuming so I am not sure that I would recommend it, but it gets the job done.
Of course there is no one way of working and I cannot stress enough how important it is to find your own methods that work for you as an individual. Yet seeing how others work and tweaking these methods to your own personal method is a wonderful way to begin to find your own nitch.

1. Start with a sketch. I recommend starting with a blue or red pencil to rough in your basic shape. I really stress 'rough' here! Tightening up is for the pencils and inking. If you can teach yourself to let go and draw very loose your figures will have much more movement and flow. Try moving your whole arm when you sketch and not just your hand and/or wrist.
After you have a loose sketch blocked in, go over this and tighten up your figure with a regular pencil.

2. Scan in your sketch and remove the blue pencil lines.

To do this:

+ Open your sketch with Photoshop
+ In the Layers panel there are three tabs at the top, select the one that says 'Channels'
+ There will be a list consisting of 'RGB' 'Red' 'Green' and 'Blue'
+ Single click on the 'Blue' tab. It will become highlighted and the other layers will not. Your sketch should become absent of the color blue. (Same method for green or red pencils, just click the corresponding color)
+ Select all of your sketch, copy it. Open a new window, paste it in and in the 'Image' tab at the top select Mode>RGB Color

So to re-cap:
Photoshop>Open>Sketch>Layers>Channels>Blue>Select>All>Edit>Copy>File>New>Edit>aste>Image>Mode>RGB Color

3. Ink your sketch on a separate layer.
Note: In this step I decided to flip my drawing and fix the eye.

+Create a brush, I use a hard round brush with pen pressure sensitivity turned on. Find one that works best for you though.
+Get inking! If you're really bad at free-hand inking- practice is very important but an easy cheat is to use the pen-tool. I could waste a lot of my time telling you how to do this but a wonderful tutorial already made for this can be found here: [link]

4. Block in your flats.
+ Set your Inks layer to 'Multiply'
+ On a separate layer UNDER your inks begin blocking in your colors. I really hate the fill bucket, I think it does a terrible job. Maybe I just don't know how to use it though! Anyway, I use the same round brush for this as the inking, just a larger diameter, and fill in free-hand.
+ CHEAT: If you are completely incapable of coloring inside the lines: Practice. But, also, you could cheat. Use the pen tool to create a vector of your flat shape.

5. Add Shadow.
+ Same brush, add some shadows. Again, I do this free-hand but if you want to cheat you could use some vectors. I think vectors make things look less organic though.

6. Example of Shadows.
-This is just the same thing as 5 but without the flats to show a little more clearly WHY shadows are where they are. Given, I still mess up a little... as you can see... but practice will eventually make perfect (someday). I find it helpful to show physically WHERE my light-source is, so that I don't forget (note the awkward 3-year old sun-burst).
Note: I decided to lower the black opacity on her hair, thats why it looks sorta gray and weird

7. Effects and Lighting

+ Set your lighting layer to 'Multiply' or 'Overlay', see which you like better, they give different effects.
+ Add some tones to skin, and some lighting over the skin with a bursh of lower opacity and with some opacity pen pressure turned on. Play around, see what works for you.

8. Color Your Lines

SET YOU LINEART TO 'NORMAL' (don't listen to my other tutorial, it lies) and follow my colored lines tutorial: [link]

9. Add some background. SIGN YOUR NAME!



And thats that. Hope this was helpful. If it was overly confusing, let me know and I'll re-explain any steps needed.