The key to producing great digital painting is TIME. Most people who are new to Adobe Photoshop will stop after the first round of applying colour to their illustration. By building up separate layers of colour, the “beginner” art will begin to look more spectacular. The main power of doing your colour work, or any work for that matter, in separate layers is you can control virtually every aspect of the final look. With some experimenting you can get some interesting and sometimes unexpectedly great results.

For this tutorial I will be colouring one of my monster illustrations. The picture started out as a pencil sketch that I scanned in. You can check out my tutorial (Pencil Sketch to Smooth Digital Shading) on how I got the picture to this stage HERE. Because this picture already has the shading done you can really concentrate on just colouring.

If you would like to follow along with this tutorial using my original full sized picture then CLICK HERE to download the image (480KB). Be patient as it opens in another window. Once it is open, right-click on the image and select "Save Image As..." to save it to your computer.

There are one hundred and one different ways to colour art in Photoshop, what follows is the way I do it. If you are interested in becoming a digital artist this tutorial will give you an insight into my technique.

I suggest you read through the entire tutorial before you begin. Let's get started...

Step 1. The Layer Set Up For My Digital Art

Open your image in Photoshop and duplicate the layer. I named this new layer "Shaded". You can now delete the original locked layer.

Change the mode for this layer to MULTIPLY.

Create a new layer beneath the "Shaded" layer. I named this layer "Solid".

Using a hard brush block out the shape of the creature on this layer. I change the size of the brush depending on detail. Make sure you zoom in when on the edges of creature. (You could use the pen tool instead if you were so inclined and then fill the path). You can see that I used grey but the colour doesn't matter...this layer will soon have it's visibilty turned off.

Now we have a clear outline of the creature.

Next I create another new layer. Using the gradient tool I fill this layer to get a basic colour (and light) scheme going. This also gets rid of the overall white of the image. The darker colour is 4E4741 at the top and the lighter shade is BBAB94, in case you are following along at home.

Step 2. Adding Colour

Before you pick up the brush and start painting go to your layer palette and click on the "Solid" layer. Although this layer is now hidden on canvas, it's purpose is to keep the colour work within the boundry. With the "Solid" layer active...

Select >> Load Selection... click OK

Now the selection is going to keep your paint on the creature and stop you from accidently painting the background. If you inadvertently lose the selection you can load the selection again.

Create a new layer to start colouring on. I named this layer "Flesh_Colour". The colour that you paint on this layer will be the basic skin colour that you image the creature to be. This of course can be any colour you wish to have for your own artwork.

My preferred brush is a soft airbrush (I use this for the majority of my work but again it depends on the image and style you're going for). Use a large airbrush with the flow lowered to around 15%. You've probably heard it before...Less pressure equals more control".

The next step is to create a new layer and add your next colour. ALWAYS create a new layer for a new colour. My layer is called "Glaze". See image below. The creature has more life already.

I used a very pale green for my secondary colour and you can see I built up the opacity of the colour in areas.

This secondary colour I created breaks up the main skin colour to give variety. You can go crazy at this stage and create a whole heap, but for this tutorial I will keep it at two.

Step 3. Adding Highlights

The next new layer is the basic highlight layer for the skin. I’ve kept it pretty dull as I didn’t want to make the skin really shiny or wet looking. Areas like the tongue and eye which are wet have more highlights.

Zoom in to areas that you want to make "pop out" gradually build up the highlight area.

I'm using white to create the highlights today. If I wanted to add more realism I would add a bit of colour to it. A lot of people will say white is a BIG no-no! The reason why you can get away with it however is because you are creating very low opacity highlights so some colour of the original layers comes through.

If you look at the more close up image above you can see that highlight lies on the right side of the bumps and lumps of the creature consistently.

If you feel your highlights are too sharp...use Blur >> Gaussian Blur. If you have finished your highlights you can try lowering the opacity of the highlight layer or duplicating the highlight layer to see what it would look like more intense. Experimentation is the key sometimes.

When you are happy with the highlights you are ready for the next stage.

Step 4. Adding the Wow Factor

In essence this is the Sarah Lee Pastry technique. We create "layer upon layer upon layer".

An easy way to make the image richer and give it a bit more depth is to duplicate the original shaded layer and to colourize it. This can serve a double purpose and give the skin a translucent look also. The image below left is what we have and the image below right is the result of our second colourized "Shaded" layer.

First obviously, duplicate the "shaded" layer. I named this new layer "Transluence_Red".

I use both hue and saturation and sometimes the lightness too. The colour balance is another that can be helpful to do minor tweaks, it's actually really good to get into the habit of using that. I use it quite a bit at work for colour correcting.

Next (the image above left) I gave the tongue a bit more colour. I just duplicated the transulent red layer and erased all but that area. See the image of my layer palette below.

I then created a layer to add a few more highlights for the eye and tongue to give it more of a wet look and to help bring them out a bit more.

In the image below you can see there are more cooler tones. I did this by duplicating the translucent red layer again I erased sections and changed the colour to something a little cooler. This purple/blue gives the impression of a fill light and helps to give a bit more depth.

On the final page of this tutorial we will add a background and experiment with altering the colour of the existing layers.

Step 5. Background and Colour Experimentation

In the image below you can see the background I created. It consists of a basic stone texture with a hotspot added to force the main subject to the front.

To create the stone texture background...

Duplicate the gradient layer. Then go into the channels tab.


Create a new alpha (you can name this stone or whatever) and apply a difference cloud filter
Filter >> Render >> Difference Cloud


ctrl f will keep applying the filter until you get something you like.

You can apply a noise filter if you like, not too much though because it can get too grainy looking.
Now back in your layer palette click on the duplicated gradient layer (make it active).

Add the light Filter >> Render >> Lighting Effects
On the left you can see the image and it has an ellipse around it. You can grab the points on the ellipse and move it around the image. One point projects a light source, the tighter the circle the brighter it will become. Try and get the ellipse to surround the whole image without burning it out. BEFORE YOU CLICK OK...

At the bottom of the Lighting Effects Menu there is a dropdown that is Texture Channel. Make sure you select "Alpha 1" (or whatever you named the new alpha you created). You will see the image on the left change to a stoney look.

Then all you have to do is adjust the mountainous slider to your liking.

Easy huh? You can play around with the settings but I just used the defaults. Once this is done I used the dodge and burn tool to brighten and darken areas but it's not really necessary.

If you look closely at the layer palettes below you can see that I have altered the hue/saturation/brightness of various layers to achieve the different results. By keeping your colour work on seperate layers you can virtually alter every aspect of the final look.

So that's it!

I hope you enjoyed this digital colouring tutorial and maybe even learnt something new along the way.

-Troy Packer
Source: melissaclifton