Here’s that “REALLY good manga-style head” I was talking about a few posts back. Of course, a pure manga head would be naught but greyscale or even B&W. But hey, I like mine with flavor. Looks like Lyle {spoilerspoiler}

Oh yeah, here’s how it’s done in GIMP, picking up from where I left off;

• As you can see, there’s definitely the black Lineart Layer and the nice calm green Backdrop Layer. I’ve added the Flat Color Layer between the two.
• First off, if there’s any areas of your drawing that are not completely bordered by Lineart, you should go ahead and close them with the Pencil Tool.
  • If there’s a specific part that you want to not have a hard outline border, make an Extra Outlines Layer and draw the border-closing lines there. Put this one above the Flat Color Layer, and you can delete it later. But you still need every section of a distinct color cordoned off. Sort of like a coloring book.
• MAKE SURE that you are working in the Flat Color Layer.
• Go ahead and equip the Fuzzy Select Tool, and make sure the boxes marked Select Transparent Areas and Sample Merged are checked, if not done by default.
• Pick a color from the Color Palette for your webcomic / personal selection. If you don’t have a standard palette, SHAME ON YOU. Make one. You’ll need consistency for this kind of work.
• Select the area you want flooded with your color. If there’s multiple sections you want of the same color that are not contiguous, hold down Shift and you can add those. Make sure everything in your picture that will be of that general color is selected.
• Don’t paint yet! Go to Select → Grow and grow it by one or two pixels (I do one, lazy me.) This will make sure that the color is beneath the ink as well, so that any printing of the picture won’t cause ugly offset and let the background peek through. Or so I’m told. Just do it, anyway.
• Use “Ctrl + ,“. This will fill the area you selected with the foreground color, being the color you selected from the Palette. Make sure that you’re working in the Flat Color Layer.
• Congratulations you have now colored a portion of your image. Repeat for all the different spots with unique Base Colors. Do whatever you like with the Extra Outlines Layer you may have made for the sectiony bit.
  • Which reminds me. If when you delete, remove, or otherwise cease the visibility of the Extra Outlines Layer, there happens to be a gap between the two colors, that’s what you get. Working in the Flat Color Layer, you can easily use the Pencil tool to touch up that bit, usually by coloring up the gap manually. It’s fine, just do it.
  • I did the eyes a different way. Because of their organic shape (and their lack of an outline border), I simply took the Pencil Tool, set it really big, and drew over the pink area in white, followed by the hazel colors in the smaller areas. Works for me.

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Next up is adding Value. That means Shading. And Tinting, I suppose, but that word sounds awful tinny, wouldn’t you agree?

This is a different head that the one mentioned in the previous post. However, I think I’ve settled into a proper method for scanning things in to be coloured digitally.

For those interested in the process (I use GIMP);

• Scan in work, with the Color Mode set to Color (Photo). You can mess about with the Auto-Tone all you like.
• Create a Layer and name it Backdrop, and completely fill it with whatever color you usualy use. Some people use white but it’s not reccomended (white doesn’t allow you to see what’s transparent if you plan on coloring things white in the image). I use a very light green which I never use for anything else. Helps when it gets to the coloring stage.
• Create a third Layer and name this one Lineart. This one should be completely transparent. If you haven’t already, the order from top to bottom should be Background (the default name for any scanned image), Lineart, and Backdrop.
• Add a black Layer Mask to the Lineart Layer.
• Desaturate the Background Layer.
• Copy the contents of the Background Layer and paste it into the black Layer Mask. It helps if you right click on the Layer Mask and set it to Show Layer Mask. Also, to see what you’re doing, you’ll want to turn off the visibility of the Background Layer.
• Invert the colors in the Layer Mask.
• Fill the Lineart Layer completely with black. You may want to deselect Show Layer Mask.
• Apply a Threshold to the Layer Mask. In this case, to really observe what the different levels do, you shouldn’t reshow the Layer Mask.
• By now, you really don’t need the Background Layer any more, so feel free to either delete it, or if you want to keep the original scan, just shove that Layer beneath all of the others.
• Now you can go ahead and right click on the Lineart Layer and hit Apply Layer Mask. This will finalize the mask. If you temporarily turn off the visibility of your Backdrop (and Background, if you still have it) Layers, you should notice that the Lineart is now comprised of your outlines, which are black, and the stuff that isn’t black is transparent.
• Finally, there’s inevitably going to be some bits that you have to manually go back and fix, be it erasing some black or filling in some blank areas. Use the Pencil Tool for that. It’s best.
  • UPDATE: Another really good way to eliminate the pixels of “dust” that usually will be found in your piece is to select all the black with the Select by Color Tool, to go into Select → Grow and Grow it by one pixel, then Select → Shrink and do that be two pixels. this will eliminate most of the little gaps inside the lineart. If there’s extra “dust” spilling out onto the areas where it’s supposed to be clear, do the same and just Select the Transparent areas.
  • UPDATE: Something else I found: if you need to go over lineart again but want to retain it’s hand-drawn appearance, checking the Apply Jitter box works quite nicely. Also, don’t forget straight lines can be done easily by holding down the Shift key.

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• Now is where you can add a Flat Color Layer between the Lineart and Backdrop Layers, and you can get down to coloring. But that explanation/tutorial is for another day

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Here’s where I’ll stop off. The next how-to will explain how to properly color your image. If you like your stuff in B&W, you can just stop here.