Simple Adobe Photoshop Coloring Tutorial

Below is a tutorial I’ve written for a cartoon character created in Adobe Photoshop. This is an alternative method from my other cartoon tutorial in Adobe Illustrator.

I start by opening a scanned pen and ink illustration. I cheated and drew mine in Illustrator because I suck with inking. Anyway, you’ll want to scan your illustration at at least 300 dpi for print. Also after opening your sketch in Photoshop. You may want to adjust the brightness and contrast or the curves to get your blacks black and your whites white. Both of these are found at Image > Adjustments.

Next, make a copy of your background layer. To do this, drag the layer onto the Create a New Layer icon. I usually turn off the original background layer, so if I mess up the copy, I still have the original.

After I’ve made my copy, I set the blending mode for the layer to Multiply. This will knock the white out of the sketch, so you can see the color your adding underneath.

Next, I create more layers for the different colors and the different shadows and highlights. All these layers should reside underneath your line art.

Now for the coloring. Using your line art layer and the Magic Wand from the tool bar, select the white area that you want to be skin colored. Using the shift and option/alt keys while clicking allows you to add and subtract from your selection. When you get all the areas of the color selected, you’ll want to expand your selection by a little bit. This will ensure that there aren’t any gaps in the color and the line. Go to Select > Modify > Expand.

A dialogue box will appear. I set mine to 5 pixels. It depends on the thickness of your line and the resolution you’re working in. You don’t want to expand it beyond the line.

After I’ve expanded my selection, I click on the layer for the skin color and fill the selection with color (using the Paint Bucket Tool).

Select the other areas for the various colors and fill them like you did above on the layers you created for them.

Now, It’s time to add in your shadows and highlights. I like to use the Polygon Lasso Tool to draw my highlight and shadow shapes, but you can use whatever tool you are comfortable with. Remember, you can always modify your selection with the option/alt and shift keys, so don’t worry about getting your selection perfect the first time. Also, you’ll notice that I went beyond the lines. Even though I do like to color outside the lines, I’ll fix this later.

After I get my selection right, I want to feather my selection. This will give it a soft edge. Go to Select > Feather.

A dialogue box will pop up. I set mine to 5 pixels. The larger the number, the softer the edge.

Now it’s time to get rid of the part of my selection that is outside the lines. Select the skin colored layer. Using the Magic Wand Tool, option/alt click on the white area. This will eliminate the excess area of the selection while keeping the part you want.

Now, select the skin highlight layer and fill the selection with a light color or white. Since your highlight is on a separate layer, you can adjust the layer opacity to make your highlight blend in better.

Repeat the above steps with the other shadow and highlight layers.

Finally, you can go back to your color layers and add gradients to them. Use the magic wand to select the color and use the Gradient tool (hides underneath the paint bucket) on the tool bar to add gradients.

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