So here’s something neat. I’m just about done colouring chapter one of DDATOL, and I discovered a neat time-saving trick.

I’ve been using the gradient tool to quickly throw down colours in abstract backgrounds. That’s what you see above. It works well – it’s easy to experiment with and is fast. But I don’t like how smooth it looks. I’ve been fighting this in the past by using a textured brush to go in, sample a colour, paint, sample again, paint, sample, paint, etc. you get the idea. It takes longer than I’d like, and it sometimes muddies the colours. On top of that, I prefer a sort of mottled texture in the BGs – something that looks more like natural media.

Fly past the break to see the results and the method.

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I’ve just finished flatting Chapter 2 of Oriental Lieutenant. For those who don’t know, flatting is a term some people use for a process that makes it easier to colour line art in Photoshop. You isolate the line art and then start filling in the various shapes in the image on different layers. In the image above, each different shade of blue is a different layer. For a traditional analogue, think of it like the sort of masking you might do for airbrushing or watercolours.

In the past, when I was colouring my flatted pages, I would CTRL-click the layer thumbnail, which would create a selection of the shape of that layer. For example, in the image above, if I CTRL-clicked the layer with the big flat shape of the sail, I’d get a big sail-shaped selection. Then I’d paint within the selection.

This is the wrong way to do it.

Kazu Kibuishi revealed to me the awesome correct way to do it, and it is very simple. It’s the “Lock Transparent Pixels” button, and if you don’t know about how it can improve your life, I’ll explain behind the cut.

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Whoops – I’m late in posting this. But there it is – the clean line art that will appear in the finished book. A few small changes were made between the rough sketch and here. (That link’s included in case you’re somehow not viewing this on my site, where in order to compare the two you need only exercise that scroll wheel a bit). It looks a bit cluttered right now, and Selim (right in the middle there) gets lost, but the colour will put the focus back on him.

Some of the line weights are a bit inappropriate, so I might fudge those in Photoshop later.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to help me out with my multiple-choice difficulties! It started out with Option 4 taking a pretty strong lead. Option 1 was sort of like a tag-along – it seems like people who liked 1 also liked 4, and 4 gained the most weight. But then Option 3 started to pick up steam late in the day!

Unfortunately for 3, if you put it in context, it doesn’t work as well as 1 or 4. So I’ve tightened up 4 a bit (you can see that above) and printed it off (you can see that below). This page comes between 19 and 20 in Chapter 4, so I’ll be pencilling it in about two weeks. I’ll share the line art when it’s done!

(FWIW, I shove a “Gradient Map” adjustment layer at the top of the layer stack, with one end representing 15% Cyan. Print it out, and when you scan it in again, and you can just pull out the blue, leaving the lovely line art.)

For a page in “The Oriental Lieutenant”. Without me providing anything so trivial as “context”, which of the four images above do you prefer?

I’m aware that, as an author, I’m not traditionally allowed to do this sort of thing. But this is the Internet! The twenty-first century’s Wild West! Anything goes!

EDIT: Durr, comments are disabled. Sorry. Hit me up on my Livejournal or on Twitter!