Happy Niu Year!

Happy Niu Year!
Sorry a little late as the festivities usually = busy time ^^; Anyways if you don’t know already, the chinese new year usually means we’re supposed to celebrate 15 days by visiting relatives and such. Married folks will give unmarried folks (kids usually)  red-packets etc etc… ^^; To see the full image, just click on image below, I will update it into the gallery later ^^/

I had already coloured the Mirai image in the last couple of entries, it would be a little strange to go backwards to demonstrate colouring. So I will use this Niu Year image above to roughly demonstrate how I colour a quick CG :)

Please take note tho, this is only one of the many many ways we can colour using the computer, and it is not a set in stone method, and I may be going a little too fast as well, so please bear with me ^^;/

So after the From sketch to ink process, I power up Sai (What is Sai?), open the cleaned up file and make a new layer over the Background layer, change that New layer from Normal to Multiply (please see the screen capture in full size for the circled items). Doing this, the colour will be somewhat transparent, showing the inked line art below.

I can rename the layer to Skin (or whatever that layer is being coloured for, eyes, body etcetc). The “Colour Difference” option you should play around with it — in my opinion, it is similar to “Tolerance” in Photoshop.

* Take note: a lot of the steps are quite similar in Photoshop actually, just maybe different names and locations, for example “Sample All Layers” in Photosho is similar “All Image” in Sai. That option tells the program to refer to the whole image (including the outline) when you make a selection (with Wand tool) or filling (With Bucket tool).
Please click on the image to see the full size screencapture

As seen from below, I make each layer for items in similar colours and fill with the bucket tool. The next stage is to make sure some of the corners and such are filled by zooming in to check, and colouring any uncoloured area with the brush tools.
 

Next, I start shading each of the layers, but before I do that, I need to hold down “control” key, and click (using the mouse) on the layer I want to shade, doing so selects the layer I had filled with the base colour. For this example, the blue part in the artwork below (see the full size image to view in detail, the selected layer will have a dotted line around it). Now when you shade in highlights and shadow with the brush tools, your colours will not bleed outside of the selection.
 

So this is what it looks like after I shade in each of the layers :) In order to use the fill tool efficiently, the line art is best all connected (usually done around the clean up stage). If the image is not closed/properly connected, you’ll see that when I fill the colours some colours are in the wrong places — the purple colour of the hair went under the neck area of the girl (see image before this one). I fixed the colour during the shading stage.

The background is quickly done in Photoshop. So maybe next time :3