How to and drawing tips
 

Lesson 2: How I accomplished AniMage in a Party Dress

 
In this lesson I give you a more in depth example of how I accomplish my CGs. I originally wanted to do this on Charles page, but I decided that I should do this on my own page since I do spot my own how-to section. I thought I would use my AniMage gift CG to John Kim. This one was rather exhausting because of the amount of layers I used to accomplish the effects, not only that but the amount of detail into the linework.
 
First Lineart image of AniMage 

Unlike the image below, you'll notice the hair is still prominent in this sketch. Reason the second image is lighter is so I could keep the contrast between the rest of the lineart and the hair itself.
  • This is the pencil sketch I finally came up with. For each of my final pieces there's a good 3-4+ thumbnail or "throwaway" sketches I do for ideas. I needed the slightly H look but it wasn't for sex, but rather for the titilation of a panty shot and garter belts. If you want you can look at a larger version by clicking on the image.

  • My advice by the way is when you scan in lineart, please put it in GREYSCALE and around 150-300 dpi since on the web you only need 72dpi to display it.  Bitmap has a bad habit of making the lines too jagged, while greyscale you can at least adjust the brightness and contrast in your Menubar IMAGE->ADJUST->BRIGHTNESS CONTRAST
AniMage in a Dress: Lineart part 2 This happens to be a second cleanup version of the first lineart image. The problem was that the lines were too thin and needed some definite weight to carry the image. This also became a problem because no matter how hard I tried to align the scan it didn't quite match, so I had to also redo the lines eventually by mouse using the line tool. Using the Polygon Lasso tool (the second tool down, on the left in the toolbar), I ended up retracing parts of the image and used on the Menu Bar EDIT->STROKE and calculated the line widths.
Halfway Done with AniMage! Wow, half done. You'll notice the sheets and the hair have depth to them while the rest of the picture has flat tones. Maybe I should show you the 3 quarter finished version and finish the lesson...but wait! I bet some of you are wondering how I colored this far. Ok, lets get into that.
  • Ok, lets Start with prepping the image. As you have seen I have clean lineart but I went straight to color. The answer to doing this, you may have heard in other how to's. 

  • 1.First let's talk about the use of Layers. Layers in Photoshop is kinda like putting a clear sheet over artwork and coloring or applying effects to it. It is in a way how cels are produced. 

  • 2.You can have as many layers as you want but remember the more layers you have the more memory, not to mention swapfile space (the hard drive space the computer takes up to make a "temp file" before and after a save.) You can also change this option to see how much of that swapfile space you are using in 4.0 by clicking onto the bottom area of Photoshop where it shows the image size (for example where it says Doc: 9.8M/28.0M ) .
  • 3.Now that I told you what layers are, there are settings to layers themselves. Sometimes photoshop has a bad habit of hiding your layers, so you can't even see the layers pallette. Well to remedy this, go to the Menubar and select: WINDOW->SHOW LAYERS. Now you'll see the layers pallette.  You'll notice that original scanneld layer is in italics called BACKGROUND. Copy that layer and rename it to whatever "Lineart" is fine. BACKGROUND layer have no changeable ability to it so that's why you need to make a copy. 

  • 4.Throw away BACKGROUND but you could duplicate Lineart layer again if you wish, just remember it takes up space.

  • 5.Now that is done you'll notice right under the word Layers you'll see a pulldown menu and it starts with the word NORMAL. Set this to MULTIPLY.

  • 6.Multiply is one of the best modes in photoshop. This means only the darkest colors will be set on top or covered up. Once you have set the original layer to multiply, you can make another layer called "Color" and color on that, and leave "Lineart" as the top layer.
  • 9.I just gave you the basics to how to make layers and how to make coloring easier. One of the problems people have however is how to color so that you don't get "anti-aliasing" (where white spots come up when you use the paintbucket). 

  • 10.Here is my advice: 1. DO NOT USE THE PAINTBUCKET! 2. Change the paintbucket  to get rid of  "anti-aliasing" 

  • 11.I use the Magic Wand (second button down, on the right in the toolbar) to select areas from the lineart layer and color in a different layer. Sometimes the selection tool doesn't catch all the areas or over extends parts you don't want in your selection. Here's where MASKING is helpful. 

  • 12.On the right I have an imaged that's masked. If you ever have done airbrush in real life you'll know masking is essiential to illustrating. It is basically like putting a piece of paper to cover up areas to keep the paint from going on parts of the illustration. Using the paintbrush and eraser in thise mode you can get rid of or add on parts of a selection. 

  • 13.The image below the masked screenshot is a closeup of the masking tool icon located on the bottom of toolbar - right below the color picker. By pressing the icon you can switch back and forth to selection mode to mask mode.
    • Magic Wand.How stuff looks when selected
    Masked ModeHow stuff looks when masked
    What the masking tool icon looks like The masking icon.

    3 Quarters of the way Done! 14.Wow almost done, Now you see how I added tones to the rest of the image by keeping the colors in their respective layers. When I was done with certain layers I merged them to another complete layer to save file space. Although, I'm not great at doing dramatic lighting, I did take note of a Light Source coming from the top of the image, but above her. I added a few filters or effects to the glass, and corsette in my finale.  

     
    Finale!
    • Here's the final, by using layers again, Filters and the text tool, I added the finishing touches to her outfit, and a message to John.  To do those alternate pieces you see in the gallery. I kept certain layers and went to IMAGE-ADJUST-HUE/SATURATION tweaking the colors to various shades.

    • I believe the PSD file came out to be a good 24mb or more as well.

    • I hope you enjoyed the lesson!

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