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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When I redesigned this website, one of the features that I neglected to include was the Tutorials section. This was probably a bad idea, as I’m pretty sure that the majority of the traffic coming into the site was from links to those tutorials. I was asked if they will be re-integrated into the new site design.

Well… no. While the information in the tutorials is solid enough, the organization is not as clean or as useful as I would like it to be. Also, the way I’ve laid out and coded the pages does not easily allow me to rearrange the way the information is presented. It’s all hard-coded HTML and very kludgy, as not only did I not know CSS at the time (ha!), but I barely knew HTML and was really flailing around in Dreamweaver to get it to look right (please, please don’t look at the code). As a bit of a kicker, while all the fundamentals are still valid, I’d like to modify it to reflect upgrades in Photoshop.

Since it needs to be completely reorganized, and doing so is not high on my priority list, it is unlikely that the old tutorials will find their way into the new site any time soon.

But that doesn’t mean I have to take the old ones DOWN. So here they are, but beware — some links will be broken and may mesh weirdly with the rest of this site.

Ye Olde Tutorials

Ah, and for those who don’t know, these tutorials cover:

• Eliminating blue Col-Erase from line drawings
• Understanding print and screen resolutions (DPI)
• Preparing line artwork for colouring
• A really useful method for creating colour schemes that are flexible and easily changeable
• Probably some other fun things.