Aloha all, eric here with a lil tutorial for you. This lil' thing is all about colouring and shading your work in Photoshop. I'm writing this believing that you have some idea of your way around Adobe Photoshop. I'm using 5.5 but I don't really use anything fancy. Just lines and layers.

If you don't QUITE know all the shortcuts than here are some you should know:

D - changes your selected colours back to the default Black and White.

X - Swaps your selected colours, foreground goes to backround and backround goes to fore.

ALT +DELETE - fills the layer or selection with the foreground colour.

CNTRL + DELETE - fills the layer or selection with the backround colour.

[ and ] - change your brush size.

ALT while using a drawing tool - changes to the eye dropper for as long as you hold ALT.

Before we get to the computer part of it all, I start by drawing a quick sketch of what I want. I don't draw it all perfect or ruled out, I just draw. I try and keep my pencil lines clean and don't erase too much. Here is the picture that I'm working with and this is pretty much the same size that I drew it at. This is a night scene, there is going to be a moon in the upper left casting light on the telescope and ground. So we have a sketch, now I scanned this at 100dpi mostly because I really don't need anything bigger than that. It's best to scan the drawing bigger than it really is so that you can add colour and detail easier. It's easier to add detail to a big drawing and then reduce it than it is to add it to a small drawing.

The original sketch, actual size.
I am going to be doing everything with aliased lines so if you are going to use a tool that has the option of turning off anti-aliasing, do it, it makes things easier for reduction and especially colouring. You'll see what I mean later on.

pencil tool
 Open the sketch in Photoshop and add a layer, let's call it Telescope outline and choose the pencil tool. Now, with a small brush maybe a size 3 start to outline the drawing. This is made easier with the pencil tool mostly because if you click once on the drawing making a small dot, and then hold shift and click again in another spot it makes a straight line.
"But there is a straight line tool already, why don't I use that?"
You can if you want, but I don't like it. It draws lines funny sometimes, try it, draw a square with the line tool, and then draw it with the pencil tool and holding shift. The pencil tool gives you a rounded edge while the straight line tool is a straight black line everytime, see:

see what I'm saying?
Also, with the [ ] keys you can change the pencil size quickly instead of typing in the line weight.
Okey doke, back to drawing, just pick a good part to begin and well... Begin. Just trace the pencil drawing as best as you can. Changing line width as you come to smaller lines and inside detail of the drawing. Try not to go below a size 2 brush, cause when you reduce it the line may get lost. It also my help to use a different colour like red when drawing your outline. That makes it easier to see your own line as opposed to the black pencil line.

Ok, skipping a bit, we are now finished with the outlining process. It isn't really that hard so far is it? I hope not. Make another layer, title it White Backround and fill it with white. Slip that layer in between the outline and the original pencil drawing. You should have a wonderfully reproduced outline of your original. Now hide or delete or whatever the original pencil drawing cause chances are your not going to need it again [you'll notice that I left off the fence that was going to surround the building. This was just a choice I made to save time].

clicky clicky
 Here comes the fun part. Colouring. I love this part with a passion. Make a new layer, call it Lighthouse Colour and put it behind your outline. Now with the magic wand selection tool [and anti-alias turned off!] select the parts that make up the light house, holding SHIFT to make more than one selection.
When the whole thing is selected fill it with a light grey colour. Every colour that you place will be the lightest that it will appear in the picture, so don't be afraid to use a light colour [also, since this is on a computer everything is VERY easy to change so you shouldn't be afraid anyway].

that's one coloured in telescope!

Now do the same for the other objects. Make a new layer called Trees and select the tree tops and fill them with a colour, then do the same with the trunks. Another new layer called Ground, fill in the grass, and then the cliff face. I also changed the white backround to a sky blue and renamed the layer Sky.
Now just give it a once over and hunt for some stray pixels that didn't get coloured. There are a few in the trees and one at the top of the telescope. Just select the right layer and by pressing ALT when in pencil mode will give you the eye dropper tool, so just select the colour and fill it in, no worries!

So here is where I am so far. Simple stuff.
Now is the time for adding different colours. So select your telescope layer and fill in objects that you don't want to be flat grey. If you set the USE ALL LAYERS box, you can keep the colour layer selected and still have your selections limited to the outline. I don't know if that explains it but try it out and see.
So here we go, I added a lense and a purple rim on the top telescope, then I coloured in the boards that hold the telescope to the base along with adding yellow lights into the windows. There's also a moon in there, I put it on it's own layer also called Moon. I just used a sizeable circle brush with the pencil tool and then drew some craters on it...

not too much changed here.

STOP!

Think for a second. Are you having fun? Is what you are doing a pleasing act?

If no, then stop. Stop working on the backround and go do something else. Write some more story, script, play a game, GO OUTSIDE. Just stop and get your mind off of it. If you are having a bad time,continuing on will just make you angry and the art will come out like crap.

If you're happy and enjoying your work than continue on...


see that little arrow at the top?

I'm glad to see you are still with me because now it gets interesting. Shading... Yes shading. So, the first thing you want to do is select your top most layer and then create a new adjustment layer by clicking the right arrow at the top of the layer tab: choose Brightness/Contrast click ok, and then set both contrast and brightness to -50

this should darken the image quite a bit.

Now the way an adjustment layer works is, drawing on an adjustment layer with black will "cut" away at the darkness and reveal the white underneath. If you use a grey it will show a lighter area but not as light as flat black, try it out a bit and see what I mean.
Now, how I procede from here on out is using a combination of the straight line lasso tool with anti-aliasing turned off and the pencil tool. I first lay down my second lightest colour by selecting the middle grey between pure white and pure black. This may be different on your pallette so just choose whatever colour you see as an average between the two.
So I use the straight line lasso tool to select areas of the telescope where the moon light would hit it, then I just fill in the selections with the grey and [taking care that I am working on the brightness/contrast layer] it should lighten the areas up a little bit.

The good thing also about using the lasso tool is that when you make a selection it can be over any part of the drawing. All you have to do is then choose the magic wand tool [with anti-alias turned off] and deselect the parts you don't want.

before

after

perfect!

Now I'm going to finish off laying down the initial light areas of the telescope.

Also do the same for the landscape and the trees.

Remember to follow the contours of the objects you are lighting so that they seem more three dimensional.

Here is my picture with the first bit of light added. I did some touching up on the telescope and added the shadows of the trees to the base of the building

I am aware that the moon looks like crap, I couldn't draw a good one for some reason so we're going to have to make do with crap for now.
At this point I'm going to go through with adding the whitest whites to the picture by using the same method as before only with filling in with pure white. since this picture is a night image, don't use too much of the brightest colour or it will end up looking like mid-afternoon.

This is what I ended up with.

There weren't many places for me to add extreme light so I just put it on the trees and ground around the telescope and on the building it's self.

So far we have 3 shades of light and now we are going to add one more shade. So, make another adjustment layer and set brightness to -50 and contrast to -50. Your whole picture should be quite dark. Now fill in the entire layer black, this will get rid of all shadow on this layer. Because this layer is so dark, we will only use it in moderation. So, with your striaght line lasso tool or pencil tool, start making dark areas with the pure white colour.
I fiddled about adding shadows here and there and I changed the brightness and contrast of the newest layer we made to -35 and -35 because the other one was just too dark for my tastes. All that is left to do is add in the backround.

All I'm going to do is draw some mountains in and add some huge chunks of light into the sky, all eminating from the moon.

And that's about it. I just did a few more touch up bits here and there and added a small shine on the lense. The mountains consist of a new layer with blue mountains drawn in, then I added another adjustment layer that only effected the mountains, set it at -100 and cut away at the top of it and filled it in with a grey colour.


Doop doop! The colours are a little messed up from being saved as a GIF

Simple, right? As far as exporting goes I got lucky in that when I drew and cropped this pic it turned out to be 641 width, which means I can just go into Image Size and type in 320 for a width and leave the height, this image was orignally intended for a cut scene and the camera would pan upwards so that's why the height is larger than 200.

So yea, that's about it...

Here are my final words on this:

If you don't want the anti-aliased look that you get after reducing this picture than I suggest scaling your original sketch in Photoshop to the size you want before continuing with this tutorial. You will have to work with a much small picture and detail will be harder to get but I think it's worth it for the aliased look [which I personally, love].

One other little tid bit on Photoshop, I highly suggest that just because you can add lights in Photoshop, DON'T. They don't make a good looking scene and it comes out looking really bad. Let me teach by example:

ugly

pretty!

I feel that the hand drawn one is MUCH better than the one using a filter.

Always try and remember your light source. Light comes from somewhere, be it a window or a lamp or just some spot in the room, light comes from that point.

You can even use this technique to redraw over ripped backrounds or objects. It would make your game look better if all the art seemed to come from your hand and not a wall you drew with a Full Throttle door pasted on it. Just trace that door and people won't even know... What ever you need to do to get the picture to look like how you want it, doesn't matter. You can scan pictures out of magazines and trace those images, find a picture of a statue online and trace it and colour it and people will think you drew it completely by yourself. People don't need to know the process that went in to the drawing, just that the drawing was completed and looks nice.

Don't want anti-aliasing? Well, I wrote this to help with 320x200 aliased backgrounds. It's a lot like this current tutorial only with a few minor changes. So enjoy! 320x200 aliased background tutorial.

I think that is all. If there is a better way to do all of this than feel free to email me or write your own tutorial. I hope you found this useable. eric out!

-eric