Colouring in Paint Shop Pro!

by: guyzngalzguild

This tutorial assumes that you've either got a scanner (you could also use a graphics tablet, but I don't personally know how to use one). I find it fairly easy to do broad shading strokes on a PC, but I can't draw fine lines. So I use a scanner to scan my pencil drafts in. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, and I'm pretty sure mine is the cheapest scanner on the market *lol*. For this tutorial, I will draw a picture of Oddhatter's gelert Ally_2002_ and the cool Chiropteric Poogle, and show you how to scan and colour it in.

Drawing and Scanning:

Take one piece of paper, and a pencil. Draw something. The amount of shading you use is up to you. I tend to shade softly and leave lots of white spaces in my drawings.

I scan the image in at 100% size and then resize and crop it to the appropriate size. On a smaller monitor, it's better to work with more manageable sizes. Then click on Colours > Adjust and then Highlight/Midtone/Shadow adjustment. make sure you have the Dynamic adjustment method checked, then Shadow should be -50 and Midtone -50. This helps to blacken the image up a bit, without harming the more delicate pencil shading. Save your image as a Paint Shop Pro .psp file. This is so that there isn't any reduction in quality. Also, if anything happens like your computer stops responding - you've got it saved.

The result should be pretty plain looking, but with some shading detail to give the image roughness. This is the guide lines that we will be using for the picture. If you have got too many stray lines on the picture, you will be able to either cover them up with the white (or whatever colour the background is) paint brush. My example seems a bit scratchy because i had to resize it to show you what stage it is.

Colouring:

The next part is the first layer of shading. Create a new Raster Layer called 'colours' or something similar with the Blend Mode of Hard Light (Layer > Properties). What this does is blend the shading with the background layer (the scanned pencil), so the pencil shows through but you don't lose any of the colour. The main thing this alters in your shading, is that if you put a colour down on 'basic shading' it will appear lighter on the picture, because it's blending with the white of the background layer. So when you choose your colour, make it about 20% darker than you normally would do. This can be really annoying sometimes, so make sure that when you do use one colour, to try and colour everything that needs to be that colour. If you go beyond the lines you can use the rubber tool to rub out the extra bits.

Colour your image in with a basic colour for each area, something would be the mid range of the palette; not dark, but not light. You don't have to pay much attention to light effects in this layer, but just make sure the foreground is nice and vibrant. For this shading I use the Paint Brush tool, with opacity set to 100%, hardness set to 50% (too avoid any hard edges) and size of 15, 20 or 30 .

Shading:

The next section is about shading. Set the retouch tool (the one that looks like a pointing hand) to "lighten RGB" you'll have to try different settings out to see what suits your picture best but try not to make it too light. Then, to create the shadows, use darken RGB preferably at the same settings as the lighten.

You can always add other colours to the picture with the spray brush, and then re-tone and highlight it. Below is an example of what i did. To create the fur effect you grab the re-touch tool again and set it to smudge, then with the brush do fast up and down kind of light close zigzag movements. This will make the picture look more furry.

Well, you can add a background. To do this, just create a new layer and using the layout preference box you can move the layers around, make sure you move the new layer to the back and then add the background. Also you may wish to use the blur tool (it's another thing on the retouch). You can use this to blend in some of your shadows if you made them too harsh. Hope this helped you into colouring with Paint Shop Pro.

The finished picture!

thank you to guyzngalzguild for this awesome tutorial! - oddhatter