Coloring Art on Photoshop.

Ever wonder how ads and illustrations have those cool graphicky solid colors in them?
Meet photoshop.


I recently posted a piece on my illustration blog called "monkey and cat":

This piece is simple in appearance. Its coloring process was fairly elemental as an illustrator, yet to achieve this screenprint color effect, I have had to understand the fundaments of photoshop. Here is a screenshot of the image in photoshop. Note that there are a good amount of layers that are present in the sidebar (For those inexperience with Photoshop, they are the little thin rows on the right).

Here is a basic step-by-step of what I had to do to accomplish this:

1. I drew the traditional ink lineart on paper with a micron pen.
2. I scanned in the image using Epson Photoscanner.
3. I opened up the file in photoshop, flipped it, cropped it, and edited it to get the lines crisp and ready for color.
4. I cut the black lineart out against the white background, and pasted it onto a transparent layer (Think of your teacher's old overhead sheets. Its like that.)
5. I colored a transparent layer underneath and set it under the lineart, so that the lines aren't covered with digital paint.
6. I adjusted the hue and saturation to meet my standards.
7. I messed with settings and layers and saved the file as a .jpg.

Voila! Monkey and Cat. (It's technically a baboon.)

GLOSSARY-

Layers- Layers in photoshop are like transparencies stacked one on top of one another. Each layer can have different images and effects. When the layers are stacked, the images appear as if they are all a single image.