How I color in Photoshop

By popular request, here's a Photoshop 5.5 'how I work' tutorial.

Step 1, make a pencil sketch.
Mostly I do small 'thumbnail' sketches with pencil, scan and and enlarge them to around 1000-2000 pixels. Occasionaly I make sketches in Photoshop (like in the example below). The lasso and transformation tool is handy for moving and scaling details that were a bit off on the sketch.

Step 2, Base colors.
I often choose dark cold colors as a base. I use a large airbrush on multiply mode to add them. I don't worry about the edges too much.


Added basecolors and started rendering.

Step 3, Rendering.
I know this looks like a big step, but if you just place a few strokes right they can really describe a lot.
I use a size 39 paintbrush (hard edges) on 65% opacity most of the time. Since I use a pressure sensitive pen (Wacom A4) I can do a lot of different sizes of details with that brush. Occasionaly I switch to larger or smaller sizes. I try to always work with the largest possible brush to avoid bad stroke economy.
I also use the airbush if I want to soften things up. I do most of the gradiations with the paintbrush though. By keeping a finger on the alt key I can colorpick really fast. Because the brush is transparent I can dillute colors that way. Of cource I vary the opacity but 69% covers most situations. I mainly work at 50% or 66% zoom, unless I work on facial details. Zooming out and flipping the painting is something I should do more.

In preferences you can set so you see a circle of the same size as the brush instead of the normal cursor. I also have some ink blobs I scanned that I use as custom brushes to do splatter marks and texture.


My PS5.5 paintbrush settings.


Details have been rendered and some tweaking has been done. I rescale to 25-50% and sharpen for web once finished.

Step 4, Adjustment and tweaking.
The rendering of a painting is a hiarchy of important and less important details. If you're doing a pin-up the main figure and silhuette is the most important. In comics they often use a fat outline around the silhuette, whilst the less and less important details get thinner and thinner lines. When painting you do the same thing, but with brushstrokes instead! You use differences in hue, saturation, value, edges, sharpness, detail and composition to lead the viewer's eye towards the focus point of the painting.
If you use the same rendering everywhere on the painting it will look flat. You can lead the eye toward important spots, but once the eye is there it needs something interesting to keep it there, like proper details. The amount of details on a spot should be proportional to the amount of time the eye stays there.
I gently use larger soft airbrushes (size 100-500) on Normal, Multiply, Dodge, Saturation, Color or other modes to manipulate the focus point and balance.


Attempt to isolate some of the techniques you can use to attract the eye.

Here's an example I made: (1) Messy texture and confusing values | (2) Atleast a little better, no?
On the first one I just rendered all the details to demonstrate how it can look if you disregard focuspoints, hiarchies and main shapes/volumes. It can be very dangerous to get excited about rendering details, especially at an early stage. You can not render details the same way in the shadow as in the light.