If you’ve ever looked closely at cleaned-up, finished Disney animation drawings, you’ll have noticed that they don’t actually use black lines. For example, Tarzan’s body is outlined in a dark brown that’s meant to harmonize with his skin tone. This is another one of those polishing techniques, and Photoshop makes it dirt-easy.

The colours you’ll want to apply to the line work should be based on the solid colour that those lines contain. In our example, all the girl’s skin shapes are outlined in a brownish colour, her neck-thing is outlined in a grey-blue colour, and her boots are outlined in a very dark red, though it’s hard to tell. Her dark tights are actually outlined in a purple colour that’s lighter than their base colour, but it’s hard to see that, too.

Clearly, with the line colour being based on the base colour, you’ll want to leave this step till you’ve already decided on your colour scheme.

Colouring the lines uses the exact same method that was used to keep the Silver Detail within the Silver boundaries: Clipping Groups.

1) Create a plain old new layer above your Line Art layer.

2) Hold down the ALT key and move your cursor between the two layers so that the cursor turns to a couple of circles with a little arrow.

3) Click. The new layer will shift to the right and a little bent arrow will point to the Line Art layer below it. You now have a Clipping Group.

4) Get your brush out, pick a colour, and start colouring. You can paint all over the image, but the colour will only show up where the line art is underneath it, effectively “colouring” your lines.

Next: Finishing Touches...