herpunishment | (no subject)

In my infinite magnanimity I have decided to make an icon tutorial to share with the public. IF MY EXPLANATIONS ARE AWFUL, I OFFER NO APOLOGIES but tell me so I can attempt to be more clear.

So first, image I'm starting with and have decided to color, plain black and white, along with what the set up should look like to begin with. Make sure the image mode is set to RGB color, and that you've made two extra blank layers to start with.

First thing I do is color the lineart, and I do this in a different way than most people. What you're going to need to do is go to the channels tab and click that button I circled there. This will select things for you!

Then go up to select and hit inverse selection.

Once it's all selected, go take your paint bucket in whatever color you want the lineart to be and go fill it in! \o/

Deselect, go to the layer beneath it and color it in white, and then trash the original background image. You can keep it if you want I guess, but there's no reason to so I just trash it. ALSO since this is kind of a pain I actually just have an action that does this all for me, so I recommend recording it and then just hitting play if you're going to make a whole set like this.

And now onto actual coloring! You don't need to worry about any special layer effects as long as the colors you are working with are lighter than color you picked for the lineart. Just make sure it's underneath the lineart and on top of the white layer!

I am lazy I just scribble the shadows in on a second layer on top of the base color.

And then Gaussian blur it so it looks okay. Haruto's hair usually has about 3.0 px of blur, but this picture was big so I used five. If you color in actual icon size, like 100x100 obviously you will be using a much smaller blur.

Highlights added! \o/ I put them on top of the shadow and don't blur them at all. Blur is just for shading. I also went ahead and did the base layer of skin tone, since I do the exact same thing as I did for the hair base layer. COLOR NO LAYER EFFECT BAM DONE.

I usually do two layer of skin shadows, one BIG GENERAL ONE for hair shadows and the ones on the neck, and if it gets in places I don't want the shadow I just erase it out.

And then smaller more detailed shadow for the nose, lips, beneath the eyes, ect. I blur these just a little, and don't actually always bother. I did Lizzie's set with no blur for this.

OKAY finally something different!! If the color clashes or if the next color is darker than the lineart I put it on top of the lineart, and set it to multiply. That is how I do Haruto's eyes.

And also his clothes. Since it's shoujo manga and has the shadows screentoned in, I don't bother doing any shading here.

Background is light, so back to working on the bottom.

THEN, if I don't like the palette I used and am too lazy to pick new colors? CHEATER TIME I use a curve layer to fix it to look the way I like. Then it's just crop and resize.

And here you go, finished icon.