Coloring Line Art - Chibi Goku Tutorial
Introduction
This is the second part of a tutorial we created not to long ago about drawing Chibi Goku. This part of the tutorial will teach you how to color and Shade the line art. We will break down each and every step so that you will know how to apply the lessons we teach you to not only this piece of artwork, but all Art work you create. This coloring line art tutorial requires intermediate skill, and can be followed in any graphic editing program. For the sake of the tutorial I will be using Adobe Photoshop. But you can use any graphics program including MS paint if you so choose. But I do recommend you have a program that uses layers so that you follow each step easily, and keep your artwork organized.
Needed Materials
Graphic Creating Software
Basic Computer Skills
Color Palette (optional)
Step One
well considering this is a coloring line art tutorial, I'm going to assume that you already have the line art. since this is a continuation of the draw Chibi Goku Tutorial, we will be using the line art that we created their. If you don't already have the line art, I suggest you follow that tutorial before you continue with this one.
Of course we start out with the line art that we created.
Step two:
as you can tell from the line art that we created, it's going to need some touch up work done before we begin coloring it. In this step we take the time to go over the line art with a solid black line with the pen or pencil tool.
Step Three:
our current image looks all jaggy and pixelated. That's not a good thing,we need to take the time to cleanup the edges and all of the line art. After smoothing everything out you should get something that looks like this.
Step Four:
it may not make sense now, butnow we are going to choose a light green color to fill in all the light areas. Well at least it looks like that, but actually what I did was on the layer of the line art I deleted all of the white. Basically making everything but the actual black line transparent. Because all we want is the black line. Now underneath that line art layer I created a new layer was completely green. You can choose any color you want but I chose green because it sort of stands out. Working on a completely transparent background is sometimes hard; so even thoughbasically all there is the line art on transparent background, it still looks like you're working on a solid canvas.
Step Five:
As you can see the image looks smooth, compared to the original, but it's still not smooth enough. Of course I could have just skipped right to the smoothed version. but I'm trying to show you that it takes a lot of time and a few tries to get the line art prepped for color.
Step Six:
okay finally online art is ready for color. I know it's about time we actually got to color our line art.but before we do that,it's a good idea to look for a color reference. considering we are coloring a specific anime character, it's a good idea to find a picture of that character. This way we know exactly what colors to use for our artwork.
I found this great little picture that shows Chibi Goku riding on the Nimbus cloud. It basically has all the colors we need so for all it's a great reference.
Step Seven:
in this step we start out by creating a new layer underneath the line art but above the green background. And we color in all of the areas that are supposed to represent Chibi Goku's skin. The great thing about having these multiple layers is that if you make a mistake will go out of the line; all you have to do is erase part of what you colored on the skin layer.
Step Eight:
all right step we are going to color and Goku's hair, his hair of course is black. So all you got to do is create a new layer just for the hair and color it in. it's as simple as that
Step Nine:
okay this step is going to be ridiculously simple all you have to do is create layer on top of the skin layer and use the color white to to fill in the white part of the eyeball.
Step Ten:
alright so next step all we are doing is creating a new layer for the clothes, you can choose to have the shirt on one layer, and the pants on another layer, but it's your decision. Keeping them on the same layer for this example is just fine.of course grab the color from the reference shot, and fill in as appropriate.
Step Eleven:
okay yet again this is another one of those simple steps that aren't really necessary as far as taking up an entire step. but this is a step by step the story tutorial and I'm showing you exactly what I did. Great lay of the belt and use the white color that is in the reference image to fill it in.
Step Twelve:
in this last step we create a new layer for the Saiyan tail that Chibi Goku has. And we use the brown from the reference image to color it in. For the most part the tutorial is now finished as far as coloring goes. in this last step I also decided to it when the missing eyebrow I forgot. And made a few touch ups.
Part Three
Of course this artwork is not completely finished, as we still need to shade it. Instead of making one incredibly superlong tutorial, we divided it up into another peice. Feel free to follow the following link to continue where we left off.