Coloured Line Art and "Transparency Lock."

A reader (hello Jason!) was asking in the comments about the inking and how it gets coloured. I'm going to describe it in detail, because not only is this technique useful for specifically this application, transparency lock can be a hugely versatile tool in your belt. It's what makes "flatting" work. I keep the feature set to a hotkey, so I can turn it on and off as I paint.

Above, you can see a panel where I've applied colour to a significant portion of the linework. That's the original line art on top, and that's the finished panel below it. Below this paragraph, I've isolated JUST the line art layer, to show it more clearly.

I'll take a little snippet from the original scan for this panel to use as a demo. First I'll demonstrate how to knock out the line art using Photoshop, then using Clip Studio Paint.

It's just a black-and-white image (though the file is currently set to RGB) on one layer ("Background"). Let's go!

Create a selection from the line art. In the Channels palette, command-click the RGB or Grayscale thumbnail to load that image information as a selection.

You'll see marching ants to show that a selection is active. Importantly, we need to "invert the selection" now. To find out why, just follow these steps without inverting the selection and you'll see.

Make a new layer. In the Layers palette, add yourself a new layer. This will become your new "Line Art" layer.

Invert the selection. Use the menu Select > Inverse, or hit command-shift-I (by default, I think).

Fill the selection with colour. On your new "line art" layer, use the Fill command to fill the selection with whatever colour you want. Use black, use pink, use whatever.

Initially (assuming you use black), it'll just look like your line art has become more intense. But if you hide the background layer now, you'll see your new "line art" layer has your line art on it. The liney parts are solid and the white parts are transparent. Good. Great. That was the goal.

Turn on Transparency Lock. On the Layers palette, click the little checkerboard-looking toggle.

That's basically it. Choose a wacky colour and try painting on your new "line art" layer. You'll see that Photoshop only lays down colour based on the existing opacity of the pixels that represent your line art, i.e.,  you'll be colouring your line art.

I set all those steps to run in an Action, so I can knock out that line art with one button press. I encourage you to do the same!

But what about Clip Studio Paint?

In CSP, there's this one little menu item to do basically the same thing. Select a layer, hit that menu item, and you're set.

I've run the menu command on the same file, below. All that's left is to click the little Transparency Lock toggle, same as in PS, and you're off to the races.

Play around with it! A little experimentation and understanding will open a whole bunch of creative options.

Meanwhile on DD4

Inking continues apace! This week I got to tackle this great cliff-face cemetery setting.

Pencil miles equals quality, right?

I also accidentally discovered that I love the ultra-fine Pentel Brush Sign Pen Artist brush pens. Much more pleasing than the nibby brush pens I've been using. Unfortunately, the ink is not waterproof, and the most-similar brush pen with waterproof ink—the Kuretake Ai-liner— is not easily available without cross-border shopping. So I'm going to try using traditional brushes.

Looking forward to getting Chapter Two to roughly 33% by the end of January. That would be nice.

All right, back to work,

everyone be lovely to each other,

TC