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Hiding lines
I just gave a huge reply on DA to someone who wanted to know how I blended my lines into my coloring. Reposting here in case I felt like working it up into a tutorial. :D
(The odd colons are DA tags that form emotions or links to people's DA pages)
Eh, it depends on the drawing. :D However, I do spend a lot of time on the drawing, because for me that's the fundamental part of the artwork, and if I don't get it as right as I can get it, then the final picture will suffer.
As far as lineart and coloring go, it took me a long time to work out the problem of how to make the lineart fit with the coloring, and the solution seems to be to make the coloring stronger. :) Basically, the eye will automatically go to the most prominent part of the picture. If your linework is dark and strong while the coloring is soft, then the linework jumps out. I've found several methods to combat this, and they can be especially effective if you combine them.
MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT HIDING LINES!
1) Soften the lines themselves. This can be accomplished by:
-- drawing the lines very, very thin. I keep attempting this and failing. :XD: :devlillymon: does it quite well in this picture.
-- coloring the lines. If you're working in a program with layers, put the lineart on its own layer. Lock transparency. Pick a color similar to the color of the part the line is defining, and tint the line. Or pick one color that's compatible with the colors used and tint the lines that one color. I did that in this picture of Gaara.
-- fiddling with the lines using layer controls to soften them. One of the popular ways to do that is to copy the linework layer, use Gaussian Blur to blur it, then use Multiply to blend it with the original linework layer. I did that on the birthday picture of Renji and Rukia (warning: almost-naked people :D). I did it subtly, instead of overtly, on that to soften the lines only a wee bit, because the lines of the coloring were really strong and softening them too much would have thrown the picture off-balance the other way.
2) Blend the lines into the color. This works better if you've got a soft, painterly style to your coloring.
-- I did that a bit in this picture, by using a soft blending brush to work the lines into the color somewhat. If you look at the date of it, though, you can see that was a while ago. :D I pretty much gave up on this technique because it took me too long and I wasn't satisfied enough with it. Now, when I do really painterly stuff, I do actual painting and don't work with lines at all - I form what look like lines by putting areas of dark and light next to each other.
--Much better examples would be :devlillymon: here and :devpaintpixel: here. :devpaintpixel: told me she uses a very small brush in Photoshop to gently smudge the linework, after she's colored it, until it blends in an attractive manner. I was never able to get it right. :D (Note that the background of :devpaintpixel:'s picture is done without lines - she uses lines for the focal point of the picture only, because they still draw attention, even softened.)
3) Make the coloring stronger. This pulls the eye away from the lines. This is why cel shading can be really good if you've got a picture with strong lines. The "lines" created by the dark and light colors next to each other have just as much prominence as the outlines do, and draw the eye, especially if you do several layers of shading.
-- This is an example I did with cel shading. You can see that the lines themselves are fairly thick, but there's so much going on with the color that it's the focal point. I've got four levels of color with each main area (skin, clothing, hair): base color, highlight, shadow, darker shadow. All the lines created when the colors meet each other drown out the black lines.
-- You can do this with softer color than cel shading too, to an extent, but it works better if you soften the lines with one of the other methods as well. I did this picture without softening the lines, and looking back at it, I wish I had, because they don't quite blend in. I juuust barely get away with it because of the focal point: the huge masses of black formed by the characters' hair that leads your eye directly to their faces. Which leads into...
4) Spot your blacks. Spotting blacks is a term used in the comic industry, and it means to fill in areas with black until you've got a pleasing black-and-white composition before you color. This makes your lines less prominent, and they stop really being lines and more a definition of masses. There's a couple of ways to do this:
-- Add solid black areas. Easiest to do, and what I use most often. This is an extreme example, but it also shows a principle of comics and manga: design your characters' appearances so that they form pleasing compositions by themselves. Tite Kubo designed the Bleach costumes to add lots of solid black to the page before he did anything else, and adds some white highlights at knee level to break it up and add detail. I also spotted blacks here. You can see what it looked like before I colored it here - the lines already fade into insignificance and you see the picture and not the lines.
-- Add massive amounts of detail. I'm not too good at this, since I prefer simpler pictures with striking graphic design. You can see some of this in the uniform here, although when I colored the picture, I ended up using strong coloring to hide the lines, and I wimped out on the hair by making it a solid mass of black instead of a complex collection of lines.
5) Use lines sparingly, and define areas with color instead. With this technique, you just use a few lines here and there to establish the basic outlines, and use blocks of color, either with cel shading or with strong shading that's softly blended at the edges (but not overly blended).
-- You can see that in this picture by :devpaintpixel: - she's used lines to establish the basic outline of the character and his clothing, but his musculature and the folds in his clothes and the texture in the rope are all defined using blocks of color.
-- For a more painterly look, you can see that :devlillymon: used the absolute minimum number of lines in this picture - in fact, at first glance you may not actually see them. The character's face, arm, and hand have lines, because they form the focal point and need to stand out from the rest. The top of his head has lines, just to pop it out from the background since the colors are similar, as does the top of the wing, to distinguish it from the hair. And then his robe has a line over his right thigh to emphasize the shadow there and to make it look like it's in front of the thigh - note how the robe over his other leg doesn't have the line, because it's going behind the leg.
Hope this helps! :XD:
(The odd colons are DA tags that form emotions or links to people's DA pages)
Eh, it depends on the drawing. :D However, I do spend a lot of time on the drawing, because for me that's the fundamental part of the artwork, and if I don't get it as right as I can get it, then the final picture will suffer.
As far as lineart and coloring go, it took me a long time to work out the problem of how to make the lineart fit with the coloring, and the solution seems to be to make the coloring stronger. :) Basically, the eye will automatically go to the most prominent part of the picture. If your linework is dark and strong while the coloring is soft, then the linework jumps out. I've found several methods to combat this, and they can be especially effective if you combine them.
MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT HIDING LINES!
1) Soften the lines themselves. This can be accomplished by:
-- drawing the lines very, very thin. I keep attempting this and failing. :XD: :devlillymon: does it quite well in this picture.
-- coloring the lines. If you're working in a program with layers, put the lineart on its own layer. Lock transparency. Pick a color similar to the color of the part the line is defining, and tint the line. Or pick one color that's compatible with the colors used and tint the lines that one color. I did that in this picture of Gaara.
-- fiddling with the lines using layer controls to soften them. One of the popular ways to do that is to copy the linework layer, use Gaussian Blur to blur it, then use Multiply to blend it with the original linework layer. I did that on the birthday picture of Renji and Rukia (warning: almost-naked people :D). I did it subtly, instead of overtly, on that to soften the lines only a wee bit, because the lines of the coloring were really strong and softening them too much would have thrown the picture off-balance the other way.
2) Blend the lines into the color. This works better if you've got a soft, painterly style to your coloring.
-- I did that a bit in this picture, by using a soft blending brush to work the lines into the color somewhat. If you look at the date of it, though, you can see that was a while ago. :D I pretty much gave up on this technique because it took me too long and I wasn't satisfied enough with it. Now, when I do really painterly stuff, I do actual painting and don't work with lines at all - I form what look like lines by putting areas of dark and light next to each other.
--Much better examples would be :devlillymon: here and :devpaintpixel: here. :devpaintpixel: told me she uses a very small brush in Photoshop to gently smudge the linework, after she's colored it, until it blends in an attractive manner. I was never able to get it right. :D (Note that the background of :devpaintpixel:'s picture is done without lines - she uses lines for the focal point of the picture only, because they still draw attention, even softened.)
3) Make the coloring stronger. This pulls the eye away from the lines. This is why cel shading can be really good if you've got a picture with strong lines. The "lines" created by the dark and light colors next to each other have just as much prominence as the outlines do, and draw the eye, especially if you do several layers of shading.
-- This is an example I did with cel shading. You can see that the lines themselves are fairly thick, but there's so much going on with the color that it's the focal point. I've got four levels of color with each main area (skin, clothing, hair): base color, highlight, shadow, darker shadow. All the lines created when the colors meet each other drown out the black lines.
-- You can do this with softer color than cel shading too, to an extent, but it works better if you soften the lines with one of the other methods as well. I did this picture without softening the lines, and looking back at it, I wish I had, because they don't quite blend in. I juuust barely get away with it because of the focal point: the huge masses of black formed by the characters' hair that leads your eye directly to their faces. Which leads into...
4) Spot your blacks. Spotting blacks is a term used in the comic industry, and it means to fill in areas with black until you've got a pleasing black-and-white composition before you color. This makes your lines less prominent, and they stop really being lines and more a definition of masses. There's a couple of ways to do this:
-- Add solid black areas. Easiest to do, and what I use most often. This is an extreme example, but it also shows a principle of comics and manga: design your characters' appearances so that they form pleasing compositions by themselves. Tite Kubo designed the Bleach costumes to add lots of solid black to the page before he did anything else, and adds some white highlights at knee level to break it up and add detail. I also spotted blacks here. You can see what it looked like before I colored it here - the lines already fade into insignificance and you see the picture and not the lines.
-- Add massive amounts of detail. I'm not too good at this, since I prefer simpler pictures with striking graphic design. You can see some of this in the uniform here, although when I colored the picture, I ended up using strong coloring to hide the lines, and I wimped out on the hair by making it a solid mass of black instead of a complex collection of lines.
5) Use lines sparingly, and define areas with color instead. With this technique, you just use a few lines here and there to establish the basic outlines, and use blocks of color, either with cel shading or with strong shading that's softly blended at the edges (but not overly blended).
-- You can see that in this picture by :devpaintpixel: - she's used lines to establish the basic outline of the character and his clothing, but his musculature and the folds in his clothes and the texture in the rope are all defined using blocks of color.
-- For a more painterly look, you can see that :devlillymon: used the absolute minimum number of lines in this picture - in fact, at first glance you may not actually see them. The character's face, arm, and hand have lines, because they form the focal point and need to stand out from the rest. The top of his head has lines, just to pop it out from the background since the colors are similar, as does the top of the wing, to distinguish it from the hair. And then his robe has a line over his right thigh to emphasize the shadow there and to make it look like it's in front of the thigh - note how the robe over his other leg doesn't have the line, because it's going behind the leg.
Hope this helps! :XD: