I would like to color a drawing of mine in photoshop but using the fillbucket doesn't look good. How do I

Question

use layers to color in the pic, but leave the drawing lines above so they can be seen clearly? I guess like they do it on comics.

Thanks

Answer 1

You've got the general idea. Use layers. You can put your drawing on the top layer. I would suggest you click on the lock icon to lock that layer so you can't mess it up. Now at the bottom of layers palette, click on the icon that looks like a square page with a folded corner. That's the new layer icon. You should now see a new layer. If it is above the locked layer, you may have to unlock (click on the lock icon again) that layer first and the drag the new layer below it. You can always relock it. You may want to go ahead and create several new layers. Now click on a layer to select it. You can now use a paint brush to lay down color. Some people will use the lasso tool or polygonal lasso to select an area (make sure you complete the selection so you get the "marching ants") and then use the paint bucket to fill that selection with color. So you could select an area on that new layer that lines up with (say you were coloring flower petals) one petal of the flower drawing on the locked layer. Add your color. Now hit command +D (Mac) or ctrl +D (PC) to deselect that area. (The marching ants go away.)

Click on another layer and repeat for another petal. You can do other things like use a paint brush with a slightly different color to change part of the color you've already added. You can also play with what are called Layer blend modes: go to the Layers palette and you will see "normal" near the top. Click on that, you will get the menu of blend modes. Play around with different modes. These change how the layers interact with each other.

When you are all done, do a Save As, change the file name and go to Layer: Flatten. You always want to do the Save As first so you save the copy you've been working on, with its layers. Once you flatten the image and save it, there is no way to go back. But once you've flattened it, then you have one image with all the original image plus the coloring you did. You can save that as a .jpg if you want to upload it to a website or e-mail or put it on MySpace, etc.

You can also Google for tutorials for "Comic style coloring with Photoshop" or "Coloring a line drawing" or "Manga style coloring in Photoshop". I think you will find some tutorials that will show you what I talked about.

Hope that helps!