okay niggas, you really do want to now how to colour?
layers go as follows:
1) Ink layer ("normal" blending)
It can be either:
- a normal raster layer containing only 100% black colour (RGB 0 0 0) lines - they can be locally transparent (think of RGBA where first 3 are fixed set to 0 and the last one can vary)
or:
- a fill layer with RGB 0 0 0 with a mask attached, where the mask is white/light where the lines go, elsewhere it is black.
2) Colour layers (can be grouped using "normal" blend setting grouping)
Those can be either:
- one layer (set to either "Overlay" or "Multiply") per base colour you wanna use. each of them has a mask. at the beginning all of them all 100% black, then using a white brush you unmask parts of those fill layers.
masks can overlay, you should only be aware that if in some place the sum of alpha channel is greater than 255, then the layer that are more top will overpower those below.
or:
- three layers per area set to "Exclusion" (imagine trousers near a camp fire - to colour them, you must use blue and red/yellow. but if you in some place decide to have green jeans, you just modify the colour of given fill layer and make some slight adjustments).
- sometimes, SOMETIMES, you can replace fill layer with a gradient map (CS4+) set to "pass through" - but that's complicated stuff.
3) shadow layer, containing shadowing (equally grey for flat colouring - best use LAB model and set L to 50%)
Find attached an example.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/102547200/Example.7zI suggest going with Final Lineart (basically the intersection of sketch and rough automaic lineart - achieved by selecting the 100% transparent area, then inverting the selection and filling everything with RGB 0 0 0),
Fill Masking (Shading B)
Base Colour Colouring (Colouring B)
This way we can go back multiple times and correct any errors done on any stage of our work. It makes creating diffrent colour/shading versions of our work too.
