Note: I have moved far away from this technique, and then back towards it. I'll have to make a new rant sometime, to reflect the changes in my methods and the technology available.
Rant 05 - Coloring Tutorial
Ok, first things first- draw it, ink it, scan it. For this method it is very important that you ink in your lines. My particular style of drawing no longer involves pencils (which can be a problem), so I'm always inked- but if you use pencils, ink in the stuff you want to keep to the final and erase the rest.
Once scanned into Photoshop, duplicate the original layer and set it on top, to "Multiply". What this'll do is make the dark pixels (the inked lines) show through and the lighter pixels vanish. In a nutshell, all you've got is lines.
As you can see, there is also a blank layer in between. This layer is where the colors are going to go (well, this layer and many others). What you do now is use the magic wand tool and the lasso tools to select the blank areas on the top layer you want colored. Once you've got your selection made pretty well, use the "Expand" function (under Select) to add a couple of pixels- this will keep you from having those ugly little specs all around your linework.
Ahh, my sinister plan suddenly makes sense. Now you can paintbucket the desired color into your selection- on the blank layer (the one under the top layer).
Fast forward 13 minutes so I can get a bunch of new layers made (as seen below), holding colors for different parts of the subject. Be sure to have them on separate layers. They look kind of ugly and MSPaint-ish right now, but don't worry about that- so long as they're on separate layers we can fix that easily.
We fix them by playing with each layer's opacity and doing some shading with the burn tool. I love the burn tool. I did very light shading on this sketch (because it's a sketch), but you can use the burn tool to make some incredible shading, so long as you're willing to spend some time with it, very zoomed in. The results of my speed shading are below (I also added some more layers with colors I hadn't added before).
Little guy's starting to look good. If this was a project I was turning in, the next step would be to go through and do some highlights with the Dodge tool, and maybe add on some textures from my library. But texturing is a whole separate tutorial. All I've got left to do is flatten the layers and resize the whole image.
-Tentus