Tips on Drawing

Important Steps before CG coloring
After you get the image scanned at 300 resolution, you'll notice that it is not pure black and white. Before you can begin removing whites to make a transparent copy, you will need to change this. Also, you can't make the background layer in PaintShop Pro transparent, so you will need to duplicate the bottom layer before anything. To do this, just right click the layer and select "Duplicate."

You can turn off the background layer now. In fact, you will need to do this in order to keep track of the transparent sections. Just DON'T delete it. Okay, now you will have to fix the "black and white" problem. The best way to do this is to change the brightness/contrast. "Can I just go to the convert to B&W option?" No, if you do this, you will have a single layer, meaning you can't make it transparent. You will need to set the contrast to 100 no matter what. The brightness is optional, I wouldn't recommend setting it above 0 or below negative 15, that will either make your lines too thin or too bold. Just play around with it a bit to see what you think looks best.

Now that your image is pure black and white, you can begin removing the white sections using the "Magic Wand" tool. The image is very large, so this could take a long time on a slower computer. I have a Pentium 2/266 and this can take me up to, and over 30 minutes. "Why don't you just resize the image so it isn't as large?" Simple, because the magic wand would leave gray areas around the lines. Don't worry though, After this step you can resize the image so coloring won't take as much system loading time. This is probably the most annoying step of CG coloring, but if you are using PaintShop Pro, you don't have much of a choice. I have heard that PhotoShop has a Multiply layer function that will make your line art transparent, but some of us can't afford a $300 to $600 program! Oh, also remember to save your image every now and then so you don't lose time if your computer crashes. (Extra note: At the time I wrote these tips I thought PaintShop didnt have a Multiply command. I was wrong about this. To Multiply the line art layer just copy the background and set its mask to Multiply mode. By doing this you can easily skip past all the trouble of using the magic wand.)

After you get all the whites out, you will notice some bits of white that are inside some lines. You can't color with these in your way, so here is how you can get them out. Method one: use the color replacer and replace the whites with black. This way will work fine, but it takes awhile and it is easy to miss spots on the image. I would not recommend doing it this way because of that. Method two: use the brightness/contrast control again. This time set it at a contrast of 100 and a brightness of negative 100. Now the outline should be solid black. (Note: the teal and red tiles in my example indicate a transparent background.)

This is the last step before you start to add color. If your image is a solid black outline you can safely resize it. For an image at 300 resolution, 25% is a good size to work with. It is still large, but you shouldn't make the image any smaller until you have completed the entire image. Also, since you scanned in "gray" mode, your image is on the color palette of the grayscale. To fix this, just convert the image file to 16 million colors. Don't forget to save!

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