when you colour your icons do you do all shading and all that?
no not really. im too lazy for that lol. just flat colours.
the reason why i colour my icons is well cos i prefer the look of my icons with colour. i have tried to have them without colour but i think because my icon banner is so colourful, having the icons in black and white looks odd? and also cos the psd i use is annoying and changes whites into like a green grey. and no i will not get a new psd. i have tried. im attached.
the reason why i don't just used like the coloured version of the manga or whatever is because first of all i don't like how it's coloured for my own purposes and because it means i can colour my icons in whatever colours i want. i can colour clothes any colours i want, i can also alter colours so they come out a specific way with my psd which has this habit of changing colours A LOT.
i'll show you from that recent colour of that amai mask panel i posted yesterday
look how different they are, especially the fact i used like a dark navy blue for his shirt and it turned bright purple lmfao. and the skin tone lightened a lot which is not good, and means i have to compensate for that with my colours and if i used the original coloured manga panels i don't have that option.
again you could just tell me to find a different psd but NO i shant. i am a creature of habit and i already tweaked this psd to the way i like it im never changing and you cant make me!!
the cool thing about the psd though is that like for example with chopper from my other blog, in the manga his hat is coloured black, so it's not as easy colouring that in and making the outlines perfect lol but the psd kinda makes it less obvious that i made it really gross and messy cos it fades the lineart in a cool way.
with this psd you also have to ENSURE that your cap is black and white. i have notice that at least for opm sometimes they are like a colour not black which is a shade...? like you cant tell normally cos its so dark it looks almost black but like if its not true true black the psd will pick that up so you gotta make sure it is definitely monochrome and ofc there is the adjusting the contrast and brightness and such and such.
i go through FIVE STEPS for each icon... damn. maybe i am doing this wrong...
also here are the steps i take for that.
first you wanna crop it into a sqaure. doesnt matter how big as long as it is a square.
then i change the contrast and the brightness. so increase contrast and decrease brightness. increasing contrast can cos the lines to be thinner or already really thin lines to disappear so turning the brightness down fixes that. but not too far down cos then the white turns grey. and now would also be the time you make it monochrome if its not already (just depends on where you get your caps from).
clean up any background junk. if it can be cropped nice with nothing cut off that's GREAT but sometimes i don't like the crop and so i just draw in the missing stuff... or try to anyways. sometimes it's easy and sometimes its just too much work and not worth your time.
then you colour!! normally i just choose colours that are found on canon coloured artwork but then for like clothes that aren't i guess the characters signature clothing i change it around to whatever. for chopper i usually make his clothes pink for example because that goes with him and also my icon border and just looks aesthetically pleasing. and ofc keep in mind how the psd effects things. if my blues are too red they will turn purple and the skin tone lightens so for zombieman in my example he gets very dark blue-grey skin. so that i get the same colours every time i have a chart that i made with the colours on there and i grab from those colours every time so they are always consistent.
add to you psd/icon border and you are done!
now i could just use uncoloured icons but the psd makes the whites green grey and if i were to then make it monochrome again its like what's the point AND i could just NOT use a psd but um NO. i like how the psd effects the line art so too bad.
do i do this in the most inconvenient, round about sort of way and there is there probably a much more efficient way of doing this?? probably. but i like my way so- once i got a process down you can not change me im like an old lady. i don't want to understand your new fangled ways.
