An easy way to color your lineart - Tutorial

Good afternoon, dear fuzzies. In one of the previous posts I wrote about why I like to use the cartoon style of characters (link). In cartoon style, we usually have contours around our objects - a lineart. Often artists leave them black, or some one shade of color. But I think it looks pretty boring!

A well-colored lineart looks much nicer and softer, so that its color is a darker version of the color of neighboring fill colors.

But painting all the lines by hand is very troublesome and long. Therefore, I found it for myself to do it quite quickly and quite efficiently.

What do we need for this? Well, first of all, our lineart and fill :3

If you noticed, for this tutorial I took a piece of art with a rabbit on the beach (link). A detailed description of how all this art was created (with all stages) I'll publish it tomorrow.

I usually paint the lines almost at the very end of the art creation process. Therefore, here we already have a well-colored fill (with shadows, highlights, etc.), which I have reduced to one layer for convenience. On the other layer is our lineart.

This is how it looks in Photoshop:

Let's duplicate our layer with the color and move it to the top.

Apply a blur filter to it. You can choose the power of blurring to your taste. For my fragment size 2407x1806 px, I set the blur to 18 px:

Rename our blurred layer to "Blurred colors" and make the "Lineart" layer (located under it) become a transparency mask for the "Blurred colors" layer. In other words, we will see the "Blurred colors" layer only above our lineart (where it is opaque).

To do this, simply hold down the "Alt" key and click the left mouse button between these two layers. It should turn out like this:

Now we need to darken the lines. Using the icon at the bottom of the Layers window, we create an adjustment layer "Levels".

"Alt + left mouse button" between this layer and the one below it - and here it is also visible only above the line. Then we adjust the levels approximately in this way (there are no exact numbers here, you can do everything to your taste).

My recent discovery: if you make the lineart more colorful, the drawing will become more interesting. Similarly to the "Levels" layer, we will create an adjustment layer "Vibrance" and configure it so that the line looks more saturated. Do not forget "Alt + left mouse button" between him and the lower.

And we have almost everything ready! But in some places you can notice "bad" places: the color of the line of the object in front "flows" into the line of the object behind.

Let's create a new empty layer on top (and again "Alt + left mouse button" between it and the one below it), and manually draw the right colors in the right places with a brush.

And now we have everything ready! 😃

This method may seem long, but in practice it is very simple and fast to use.

And here is the PSD source of what we did here: https://disk.yandex.ru/d/ud6C453UOdo0eQ

I hope it was helpful for you :3