Quick ‘Cheat’ Guide to Painties
AKA how to turn that grayscale PNG into a layered PSD for those used to working with Aywas-style bases.
For those of you having issues with the ‘overlay colors on grayscale’, I found an easy way (on SAI) to turn the grayscale into a layered PSD like the ones Aywas uses.
Open your grayscale image in SAI, duplicate the layers 3 times (so you have 4 total).
Set the first (topmost) layer to luminance, lower opacity to 30%.
Set the second layer to overlay, lower opacity to 50%.
Select the third layer, go to the Layer menu and click on “Luminance to Transparency” and set the mode to multiply. (This option basically turns white into transparent, and grayscales as semi-transparent depending on how dark it is! This trick works to rescue lineart you’ve merged to a white BG layer or even to eliminate the white BG of a scanned black and white image, btw.)
Lock layer 3′s transparency and you can now color this layer to whatever color you want your shadows to be.
The final (lowest) layer you lock as well, and just block-color it your base color. You can now create layers above this, clip them to the base and start adding markings.
Make sure to clip all three layers to the base to avoid glowy/white pixels around the edges when you save.
This is what the basic setup looks like when you’re done.
The lumi layer gives you the highlights (adjust opacity of this layer for brighter/duller highligts), the overlay/multiply gives you your shadows. For many you will still want to add another overlay/lumi layer for extra highlights and shines (like eye shines and metal gleams) but this setup does most of the work for basic painties. Here’s what the above setup looks, I added some different color spots so you can see how the shading behaves:
As for actual edits to the base, you can add them as you would any edit on an Aywas file, with the one difference… you want to duplicate your lineart layer and merge it to your base so your base goes all the way to the edge, then set your lineart to multiply, and/or merge with your shading to achieve that ‘almost lineless’ look that the Furvilla art style has.
I do recall Photoshop has a trick to ‘deleting’ the white from a layer to duplicate this tutorial on it, but I haven’t done it in a while and it’s not quite as straightforward as in SAI. But it IS doable.
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