Colour Swap Tutorial
To test your skills and improve your art skills colour swapping is a wonderful way to do that !
So the steps to colour swapping is simple. You take1 thing and swap the colours with another.So they don’t have to be perfect but every time that you practise this technique it will improve your skills.
So the steps are the following :
STEP 1 : Pick your 2 images - below i have picked two images i want to colour swap.
STEP 2: COLOUR PICK - pick one you want to colour swap to- in this case I chose the Pokemon Boulders colours to swap. (We start off small with just swapping colours on one of the images, once we are further advance we can proceed to tutorials to colour swap both).
STEP 3: DROPPER TOOL - in order to select the colours use the dropper tool (all art apps have this tool it looks like a little dropper). Use that tool to select your MAIN COLOUR. (The main colour is the colour that you see the most of, in this case the colour is blue.) You would take the MAIN COLOUR and put it in all of the main spots on the other image.
So you make a new layer and put the layer on top of the image. In my case it is the Purrloin image. That new layer you can label as “MAIN COLOUR” .
STEP 4 : COLOUR TRANSFER - in order to transfer the colour you need to use the selection tool and highlight all of the spots where there is main colour. After that you use the paint brush tool to put in the colour of the other image (Boldore main colour blue). So we get something like the image below.
STEP 5: COLOUR SETTING - Go to your blending options ( Every app has it where the options are multiply,add,subtract etc) Change this layer to “COLOUR”. And now you see we have successfully changed the pokemon to match the other image (boldore).
STEP 6: SECONDARY COLOUR - Choose your secondary colour (the colour that you see the most of after the main colour). In my case it is this orange colour. You will repeat steps 3-5.
Colour picking and colour transfer:
Now if the secondary or any of the colours is a dark colour then you need to select “HARD LIGHT” and then gaussian blur the layer slightly so it’s not blurry but the color still stays in place (in case there are lines) and you will get something like this:
Now the next step to clear all the smudgy blur spots is to highlight the PURRLOIN layer again, invert the layer and use the eraser tool to erase all of the unwanted smudgies.
Now you select the smudgy SECONDARY COLOUR layer and you erase the outside portion of the Purrloin. Like so :
Now if you want since you are the secondary colour layer you can erase around where the smudges are if you want. (by using the selection tool on the Purrloin layer you select all of the areas of the secondary colour layer, inverse the layer and then erase the stuff outside of it :
STEP 7: FINAL COLOUR - choose the final colour that you see (in my case it is the yellow, the black on any image we can decide to use it for either in this case ( eye lids or eyes) I have decided to use the black for the eye lids but we like to get rid of all of the colours first and then the shades.
Now to do the yellow on the eyes I make 2 layers. 1 layer is : colour the other layer is hardlight and it will look wonky like this :
Now we have 2 FINAL COLOUR LAYERS. The top one is hard light and the bottom is colour. For the top final colour layer you need to do gaussian blur (not more than 3-4) And you will get this :
STEP 8: SHADES - you can now put the black on the eye lids and anywhere else you think it needs contouring. Remembering to use the gaussian blur tool when you need it and selection tool if you need it and just experimenting to see what works.
Now to really make it POP we make 2 new layers .
1. dark shade layer : use black in areas where you would see dark would be . After you have used your paint spray brush (or whatever brush you like) you go back select the purrloin layer, inverse and erase the spray paint thats around it. Now after this is done you have this image :
What you do next is change the layer setter to OVERLAY.
and now we add the light since it looks off.
2. light layer : use white in spots where you see light would be .
Now we choose the following setting : OVERLAY and you make 2 OVERLAY LAYERS so you get this:
And you are done ! You have successfully done a colour swap/ palette change. Congrats! Keep practising this to get better and better!