im pretty sure u already answered smth like this before but i didnt really get it 😭 but how do u guys turn the screentone (dots) into grey (smooth) like in reo mikages panels for example. i have a really hard time cleaning those up cause of the lines in the hair and was wondering if there was an easier way to do it. thank u for all these clean panels by the way!!!
hi anon, the long story short is that i draw over the half-tone to create a layer of solid colour! a lot of it comes from practice as half-tones are normally used for shading, so as long as you use a darker colour for the half-tones it'll look okay!
i'll use one of the reo mikage panels for an example. i start with removing the background by erasing it, so i have this to work with:
zooming in on the hair, this is what it looks like:
as you can see, the half-tones and the thin black lines make this awkward to clean. so my solution: ignore them! i pick a colour roughly the same shade (you can use a blend tool if you want to get it as close as possible) and use the bottom layer with the panel as a guideline of where to draw the new region. i always do this on a new layer to make all the other sections easier later on.
then, repeat this for the other half-tones. if you keep each shade of grey on its own layer, you only need to be neat around the edges by hiding parts underneath what you've already cleaned. i most use this just to save time:
as for the black lines on top of the half-tones, you can either continue using a previous shade of grey, or make it a little darker for more shadows, but again i recommend just drawing over these. if you were to try and keep these lines in the panel would look messy in my opinion.
i also picked a darker grey for the shading on the face rather than cleaning around the black lines:
finally, i replace the original panel at the bottom with a solid layer of black:
the final panel then looks like this:
this is just much simpler than cleaning around half-tones and the more cleaning you do the easier it will become for you to grasp where to cover black lines for shading, and where to leave some in. i will sometimes leave a few as a lead-up into a shaded area. for example, leaving a few darker lines in on jason's neck here makes it look closer to the manga's original art style:
the most crucial part of using this method to remember to keep every new shade of grey on separate layers!
also for future reference, all posts of this kind are tagged with "cleaning help" and are linked on our "about" page!
