Watchers come in a myriad forms, but most are known for a certain degree of body horror. Even when they adopt humanoid forms, most of them still display completely inhuman traits- Spilling eyes from a misplaced, body-wide mouth is not unheard of.
Hello! Today I bring a watcher, the original entities from my campaign! It's been forever since I drew one but I have been facing an art funk of late, and I thought it would be a fun way to get back in track. I hope you enjoy this spooky lady!
idk how many of you are using this already but hopefully it will help someone out when saving gifs. but basically in this tutorial kinda thing i’ll try to explain how to play around with your colour palette to have your choice of 256 colours bc PS can be a b*tch.
How do you do your coloring for your gifs? Your coloring on your purple one for t swift was so amazing.
Okay so I know everyone does this differently, but I personally am very much a fan of doing coloring from scratch. Usually, I try to start with a color I know won’t pull from the body color. So for my purple set, finding something that was magenta already and only had to be tweaked to purple or changing something from blue to purple was pretty easy. If you look at my blue and purple set you’ll see I used the same scene from the LWYMD music video because it has a great steady background! Below I’ll show you what I do for this.
What you need for this tutorial:
Photoshop
An understanding of how to make gifs already
Some idea of how to use selective colors
I am going to try to make this short and sweet, but sometimes changing the color of gifs can be v difficult it just depends on the gif and how much work you are willing to do.
Step One: make your gif, I am using one with a steady background that the color can easily be changed on
Step Two: Selective color your layer first. The main background color in this is magenta so I open the magenta selective color and I tweak it so it is purple.
Step Three: Selective color, new layer, neutrals and blacks. So I take a new selective color layer and fix the skin a blacks a bit with neutrals and blacks.
Basically what I have done is completely separated the skin from the color magenta so that when I tweak magenta it only tweaks the background.
Step Four: Curves layer. A curves layer basically just adds light and shadow to the picture.
Step Five: After the curves layer I always do a color balance layer. What this does is help add color back into the skin and the image after brightening it. A lot of the time it also makes things more clear. I usually like to make the shadows and midtones warmer and then make the highlights blue and cyan to help make up for computer screens and how they translate gifs.
Step Six: Another selective color layer for magentas. This is where we make the magenta more purple than pink. As long as you understand how colors work this is pretty simple. Adding more cyan to magenta gets you purple, tweaking this to whatever shade of purple you want is the more complex part.
Step Seven: Levels and another selective color layer. Just because I really like for my gifs to be brighter and I also like for the colors to really stand out, I’ll start alternating a lot between using selective colors and levels to make sure everything stands out.
Step Eight: Vibrance layer. I always do a vibrance layer toward the last part of this to make sure the colors stand out better and to make sure the skin still has color and isnt washed out.
Last Step: Lastly, I ALWAYS add an exposure layer last. The reason for this is because of how gifs save and how it translate onto Tumblr. The settings I use are the same ones I always use no matter what.
I was asked to explain how I did the text effects for this Dinah Lance set and while I usually have no idea what the heck I’m doing, I thought I might spare some others the madness of figuring these out.
It’s pretty easy and this is less explanation and more just a walkthrough but here we go
i’ve gotten a lot of requests recently asking me to make a tutorial for my ‘colorporn’ gifsets, and i think i’ve finally gotten over the traumatic incident 3 years ago, when i spent all day writing out a coloring tutorial only to accidentally hit backspace causing the entire thing to be wiped. so, here it is, buckle up folks! it’s going to be a long ride but here’s hoping it’ll be helpful.
so we’ll be going from left side (no coloring) to right (coloring & color porn):
hello everyone! under the cut you’ll find a tutorial explaining how to make pale and pastel gifs without turning the subject into casper the friendly ghost. please keep in mind that this is not strictly a step-by-step coloring tutorial - i won’t be teaching you how to recreate the exact look featured in the header. it will be more of a “foundational” guide that teaches you the basic techniques of anti-whitewashing, so that you can apply them to all sorts of different scenes. with that being said, let’s get right into it!
all you need for this tutorial is a version of photoshop with a timeline option, and a basic understanding of adjustment layers.
Hii Becca, congrats on your 15k! 📝Could you do a tutorial of how you do your rainbow color sets?
of course! let’s talk about rainbows such as the ones i’ve created here, here and here! this is maybe going to be more of a series of tips to use when attempting a rainbow set as i have my colouring tutorial explaining how i colour my gifs!
i’d also recommend taking a look at my tutorial on how to get several gifs in one as i also use techniques from this.
so let’s get started under the cut!
tip 1: finding scenes
one of the most important things when attempting a rainbow set is the scene picking. i usually go through and pick the scenes i like, but then sort them into their base colours. so for example i will put all of the blue scenes into a folder, then all of the green scenes into another folder (you can see a screenshot below of what i usually do).
this will save you a lot of time because it’s easier to enhance colours that are already there, rather than have to colour each scene from scratch. the smallest rainbow i’ve done is 30 gifs which is still quite a lot for one set (the others are both above 60) so you really want to make life easier on yourself by using scenes that already have those colours in them.
tip 2: decide on your layout
people have come up with all kinds of exciting ways to present rainbows recently. you have ones like i listed of my examples above which is fairly simple boxes or rectangles together, or you can do things with different shapes such as this really cool layout. you can experiment with whatever you want but it’s a good idea to start with an idea of what you want to achieve and how many gifs you want within it!
tip 3: start with your black and whites
the way i like to do my rainbow set is as a gradient, so each line gradually changes from one shade to the next. the easiest way for me to do this is by starting with my white lines and my black lines, even though they are at opposing ends of the set.
for my witcher set, because the darker scenes included yennefer with fire, i knew i needed to go from black to either red or orange. i went with red and was able to work, so this gave me the ‘starting point’ for my rainbow (even though on the set it’s the ending point, i know that’s a bit confusing!)
but having this meant i could now figure out my ending point. i knew this needed to be either pink or orange as these are the colours next to red in the spectrum. in making my white gifs, it was easier to add a little touch of light pink in with my colouring, so i created a white to pink transition as such:
this has now given me the ‘start’ and ‘end’ points for my rainbow, which is really helpful in knowing my sequence of colours and how i’m going to transition throughout the set.
note: you can start anywhere on the colour spectrum like this, i could go from black > blue all the way through to say green > white. i will say in my experience i have found it more effective to transition from black to a warmer colour (such as red or orange) because these colours standout well on a black background which gifs you an effective gradient effect, but this also depends on the shows i’m working with.
tip 4: getting a line of gifs to match in colouring
obviously one of the key things about a rainbow is that each gif in a line is a similar shade. otherwise you won’t get quite the same rainbow effect going on! as i said before please read my colouring tutorial because a lot of what i’m going to talk about now will be presuming you’ve already gone through that.
so in order to get my colours to match i firstly colour all of my gifs with their basic colouring separately, and then put them all together as so:
as you can see these all have elements of pink in them but most are not fully pink and also the shades do not yet match. but that’s fine! now i have them all together it’s easier to see as i colour each one how the shades match to each other.
i proceeded to use my usual colouring method of using the paint brush (step 3 in my colouring tutorial). each of these gifs have all been coloured with the exact same shade with the brush, each under all the other colouring layers, with a slightly pink gradient over the top of all colouring layers. for the right hand gif i used some hue/saturation adjustments to change the cyan/green shades to pink but otherwise, they’ve all had the same painting adjustments:
as you can see they’re now a lot more pink, but they still don’t match in shade! the middle and right hand gifs were far too purply for me as i wanted more of a ‘rosy pink’ shade.
so, i added a few paint brush layers on top (again in exactly the same shade). in the middle gif, i have added a little bit of colour around the top of her head and set this to ‘hard light’ to lighten this area.
on the right hand gif i added a layer covering the entire gif and set this to multiply to bring a bit more colour depth, then added another layer with some colour to the top of the house as it’s shade is a little lighter, and set this layer to ‘hue’ lowering the opacity to 35%:
we can see here that the middle gif has been lightened around the edges, and the right hand gif now has a much stronger colour with the top of the house matching the rest of the gif!
but this still isn’t quite there. the shade of the left hand gif is still a bit lighter and more ‘rosy pink’. so, i cracked out the selective colours! selective colours are a dream when it comes to rainbow sets. all i did here was play around with the magentas using selective colours of each gif to get them to match.
left hand gif: i darkened the magentas a little and added more cyan tones
middle gif: i lightened the magentas, adding more magenta and yellow tones
right hand gif: i lightened the magentas, adding more magenta and yellow tones. i also added a layer of white with my brush right at the bottom and set this to ‘softlight’ lowering the opacity to 31% to just lighten the ground:
ta-da! now it seems like a cohesive colouring! the key here really is to just play around with your selective colours, look at the gifs together and see how each one matches to the next.
tip 5: transitioning between shades
as said before i really like making my rainbows more of a gradient where we transition through different shades. so i’m gonna walk you through how i work adjusting from one shade to the other and making it look ‘cohesive’.
so i usually work from line to line. i firstly try to get all of the gifs to match each other in colouring, and then i worry about how that looks in relation to the row above/below it. it’s always good to open your lines together on ps (even if they are in separate gifs) just so you can see how they work next to each other. so i have my first line here all coloured:
i’m currently transitioning from green to yellow so i want the next line to be more of a yellowy tone, but also not too yellow or the transition will be too sudden. so, what i do is create the next line of gifs and colour these also in green, using the same shade of paint brush as i did for the above line:
as we can see the greens match pretty nicely! the only issue of course is that i want the second line to be more yellow. but this is where we go back to our trusty selective colours. so starting with that bottom right gif, i added a selective colour layer reducing the cyans and increasing the yellows, then also a yellow selective colour layer increasing the yellows and magentas, and decreasing the cyans. i also threw in a hue & saturation layer to lighten the yellows so we get this:
now this is definitely stepping the colouring towards yellow, without making it a strong yellow yet (as that’s what my next line will be!). this is therefore a great transition shade between the light green and yellow, and will add a nice cohesive look to the set. with the right hand gif in a shade i like, i then worked on the other two gifs to get them to match the row (as spoken about in tip 4!).
this was again achieved by using selective colours adjustments to decrease cyans and increase yellows under the ‘green’ and ‘yellow’ tones. although for the left hand gif i also added a layer set to ‘color’ on top of all colouring layers at a dark green/yellow shade just to get a stronger colour for the background!
and there we go! we now have a green to yellow transition fade. to create the entire effect i continue like this. for the next line of gifs i would colour them in yellow, and then make any selective colour adjustments needed to create a ‘smooth’ transition, and then move to orange and on to red. i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again: play with selective colours! they are your best friend for making rainbow sets and really do make a world of difference.
the end
and that’s it! i hope the techniques i’ve gone over will help you get your head around rainbows and how best to tackle them. doing a rainbow set can seem daunting because there are a lot of gifs involved, and i will admit they are time consuming, but it is most about repeating techniques over and over again as you move through the rainbow.
i started on a ‘smaller scale’ of just giffing one of my characters in every episode and trying to make each gif flow as more of a gradient between a few colours, and that was a really great exercise for me on how to manipulate shades and get a set to flow in a cohesive gradient before i built up to a whole rainbow. so if you wanted to experiment with something like that first it might be a good starting point.
anyway, i really hope this helps and as always, if you have any further questions please feel free to ask :)
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