Mangacap Colouring Tutorial
Recently I got into colouring mangacaps (blame my love of My Hero Academia) and I’ve been colouring pretty much non-stop for the last few days. A few friends have asked me how I do them, so I thought I’d compile this little tutorial! Keep in mind I’m still a noob, but if I can do it, y’all can too.
For software, I use Medibang Paint, which is free and easy to use.
Step 1: Grab a screenshot of your panel. Here’s mine:
Step 2: Clean it up - remove any speech bubbles and trim the canvas so that there aren’t any white edges, like at the bottom of mine. To get rid of the speech bubbles you press I to select the eyedrop tool and click on the background to chose the same colour, press B to switch to the brush tool, and then paint over them. If they overlap the drawing, just paint the insides and remove the text.
To trim the canvas, go to the “Edit” menu at the top of the screen and select “Canvas Size”. From there you can crop it.
Step 3: Above the layer box at the right side of your screen, there is a dropdown menu called “Blending”. Right now it’s set to normal, but that’s not what we want! Drop it down and select the one right below it, “Multiply”. This will let us put colour below the white bits.
Step 4: Make a new layer, either by going to the “Layer” menu right beside “Edit” at the top of your screen and clicking “Add”, or by clicking this button.
Drag that layer below the layer with your screenshot in it, and pick something like hair or skin to start colouring with the brush tool, B. In the “Brush” menu at the left of your screen you’ll want to click on “Pen”, because this will give you an even colour. You can pick your colours in the colour bar, also at the left. Make new layers for each piece you do, for example hair, skin, teeth, and eyes. The colours will show up beneath any white area of the screenshot.
Step 5: Looking good! But the original screenshot was shaded with grey, which is fine and dandy if it’s a black and white manga but doesn’t look so good when shading colour. To fix this up, make a layer above the layer with your screenshot and set it to “Screen” in the Blending menu. If you paint in this layer (use a colour darker than the colour you’ve painted that area with) it will cover the black lines. NOTE: If you leave the colour layers on, painting in the screen layer will seem to effect them, making them look glowy and not very nice. You can turn them off by clicking the little white dot beside them. After you’ve done this, go about painting over those lines!
Step 6: Alright! Now here comes a very important step: you’re going to combine the “Screen” layer and your original screenshot. To do this, click on the “Screen” layer (mine is titled Line colour) and then click the box at the bottom that looks like… surprise surprise… two boxes becoming one.
Step 7: Turn the colours back on, again by clicking the space where that little white dot used to be. Boom! It should look something like this:
You can stop here if you want, if you want just a coloured version of the original panel. But, if you want to, you can personalise! Add details, hair highlights or a nose or some cool lighting, maybe an aesthetically pleasing background. Muck around, have fun!
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