By request, here is a brief tutorial for coloring in Paint Tool Sai. This tutorial is made for people who are beginners with digital art so I’ll be explaining a lot of basic stuff. Let’s start ~
Open your panel in Paint Tool Sai
Use the selection tool or lasso tool to select the background (press shift to add more selection areas)
delete the selected area by pressing the “d” key
If it’s a more complicated background, I just manually erase using the eraser tool.
After cleaning the background, I usually go to filter -> “brightness and contrast” and increase both the brightness and contrast to make the lines less fuzzy and more crisp
and then:
Next I’m changing the width of the canvas to 540px to fit tumblr sizes
and then:
The little square thing is on the right side because I want to extend the canvas to the left
But if you wanna extend to the right you have to move the anchor to the other side.
result:
Next set the layer mode to multiply. This will basically turn the mangacap into a lineart and allow you to color under it ~
Make a new layer under it, that’s where the background color will go
Choose your background color and add it to the lower layer using bucket tool
Next, make a new layer between the background layer and mangacap layer. That’s where the actual colors will go
You can put all the colors on one layer or have a different layer for each color (the latter is what I like to do)
In this case there’s pretty much only skin to color because Sasuke’s hair and outfit are black, but usually this is what my layers will look like:
So now we need to select the part that we want to color, in this case Sasuke’s skin. For this I’m going to take the magic wand
And click on the area I want to color (Sasuke’s face). Make sure you’re on the mangacap layer when you do this
The selected area will turn purplish blue.
Now click on your color layer and use the bucket tool to fill in the selected area
The magic wand is a really good tool but it’s not perfect and it might miss some small areas, I just manually fill those in with the brush tool
-->
Now that you’ve got the base color filled in, lock the layer so you can add shading without worrying about going outside the lines (this will make your life SO much easier)
Select “preserve opacity”
This will cause your layer to be locked
Now you can go crazy with your shading ~
For shading, just choose your darker and lighter shades and use the brush tool to put them wherever you see fit. You can go for basic cell-shading
Or a more blended shading
It all depends on your tastes!
You can achieve all sorts of blending styles by messing around with the “blending” and “dilution” settings of the brush tool ~
You can also use the blur tool to blend different shades with each other
There are many other tools you can use for blurring, blending or achieving special effects, like watercolor textures. I personally only use the basic blur tool but that’s because I’m an old grandma who sticks to her old ways, you can experiment and find new stuff!
Also my method of coloring is just spamming exaggerated highlights and shadows everywhere until it looks good lol. But that’s not the correct method from a technical standpoint - if you wanna do it correctly it’s better to choose a light source and keep it in mind while shading, here’s a lighting tutorial from someone who knows what they’re doing way more than me
And here’s a handy little guide, once again by someone who knows what they’re doing
Once you’re done with your colors you can add finishing touches via textures, or you can move to photoshop and add some psds! I personally prefer textures since you don’t have to bother with moving over to photoshop - you can achieve various effects with textures by adding them on top of all your layers and setting them on different layer modes (multiply, screen, overlay, etc.)
Experiment and see what looks good!
original:
with psd:
with texture:
And that’s the end of the tutorial! Hope this was at least a little bit useful to you guys ~ !
omg the new manga has been out for 2 mins and the fandom's already trying to police people's opinions asgshshsjsj it's been years but the ft fandom police is still alive and well i see
