Program: Photoshop 7.0

The kind of lineart where vector drawing is most helpful is like this, where the lines aren't totally defined. If the lineart does have perfectly-defined black lines (an example is this, though the lines don't need to be so thick), there's an even faster method in which you use the Magic Wand tool, then go to Select> Modifiy> Expand, and expand the selection by one pixel. Then use the Paint Bucket.

This method is slower, but still faster than coloring manually with the brush tools.

You're working on (in this case) Layer 2, the layer between the background and the lineart. The background is set as a colour unlikely to be in your picture... it tends to make things clearer.

I like to start with the hair. People have different preferences, so whichever works best with you, go with it.

Whatever your FOREGROUND COLOR is, that will be the color that the shape you're creating here will be. It's a good idea to just practise drawing random shapes until you get the hang of this.

Again, practise making random shapes with corners first before doing this.

Remember that you make corners using the PEN tool, not Direct Selection.

The thing that annoys me with Photoshop is that, even though vector art like this shouldn't be so pixelly when you zoom in... it is. It's annoying. I really should have done this tutorial in Illustrator... except I can't find the installation disk. Crap.

anyway.

With a little practise, and depending on how detailed your drawing is, this can be accomplished fairly quickly. (Check this out, though... It makes your face hurt just to look at it. How the hell do you keep track of all those hair strands?! How!?!)

The nice thing about vectors is that it looks good even when you take the original outlines away. In the next picture, I'll show you what I mean. When you're using a brush, the outlines end up wobbly.

There are a couple of locks of hair in there that look odd. Well... that's because of the original drawing, not errors in the vector tracing.

Here's the completed picture... well, not complete since it's unshaded still, but with the main colours filled in. In the right picture, you see what I said previously, that it looks fairly good sans lines. If I were to do that, I'd have added in a nose and redid the eyebrows so they showed up, but otherwise, you COULD stop here.

At this point, I do two things:

1: Save a copy of the original, so that in case I screw up the shading, I can go back and retry, and

2: In the copy where I'm doing the shading, merge all the Shape layers into one normal one. This isn't a filesize issue, it's a way to make things simpler or else you'll be juggling dozens of layers with no idea wtf is what.

Naming layers does help, though if you think you can keep track of them anyhow, don't bother.

Now you get the light (or dark) shades, whether by just making them or using the eyedropped tool off a reference or whatever, and start shading. Creating shapes is pretty much the same as you've been doing, except this is more based on intuition than straight-out tracing.

As for shading advice... eh... Usually I go by gut. If you want to learn how to shade and which spots are dark and so on, start copying from photographs or real life. It does help, a lot more than slavish plagarizing copying of other CGed pictures.

In this kind of shading, you don't need to be super detailed. Sometimes less is better.

And you go on from there. Really, a lot of shading I do, I don't even think about the "right" places to put light or dark... I just do it willy nilly. Do try to keep in mind a light source, in this case, it's coming from our right.

That's pretty much it for now. Ta ta.

-- 9:01 PM May 19 2006