Treetops Step by Step

Click onward to see a step-by-step process of how this image came to be. Or don’t! See if I care!

FIRST! I scanned the image with a scanner. What this is, is basically a magic mirror that puts things into the computer. If you stick your face in there and press the button it will read your thoughts. Terrifying!

It may not look it, but this file is pretty huge. I think it is best to work as large as possible because that leaves you more options. You can always make the image smaller later. Here is what the lineart looked like at 100%:

This is ballpoint pen on laser copier paper, by the way. Now the next step is to put the lineart on its own layer. Here is the method I use:
Go to the Channels palette, choose the RGB Channel, and press Load Channel as Selection. This will select the white areas, which is the opposite of what we want, so go to the Select menu and choose Inverse. Then make a new layer, set your color to black, and press Alt + Backspace. This will fill your selected area with black. Now you have the lineart all on its own special layer! How nice for it.

After this I made a later under the lineart and filled it with a brown color, just to have something to work against:

Next I start to block in some basic colors. I use the Pencil tool because I don’t want a fuzzy edge. I’ll go around the edges of the area I want to color, like the leaves of the tree, and then use the Paint Bucket to fill in the inside of the area:

Then I’ll do the same for each significant element, which in this case means the tree trunk, the robot, and the parachute.

Notice that the colors I’m using to block in aren’t necessarily the colors I want for the finished image; I’m just using that bright yellow, for example, to distinguish the parachute element from everything else.

Next I start to add some highlights on the tree. I’m using an “Oil Pastel brush” for this; I don’t remember where it came from but I like it a lot because it adds some nice texture. Because I have the tree on its own specific layer, I can simply enable “Lock Transparency” on the Layers palette, which will keep me from drawing on any transparent part of that layer. This means I don’t have to worry about staying in the lines or drawing over other areas of the image.

Keep color in mind when adding highlights and shadows, too; in this case the light is coming from warm sunshine so I add some yellows into the highlights. Similarly, I add cool blues into the shadows to balance out the color.

At this point I felt the robot was getting lost in the similarly-colored area behind him, so I altered his color to pop him out a little more.

Then I added some more foliage behind the main tree to give the scene a sense of greater depth. If I were going to spend more time on this, it would be easy to add multiple overlapping layers with greater detail and texture to make the image even richer.

At this point I accidentally turned off the lineart layer and decided that the image still holds up pretty well without it, which is a good sign:

I decided I liked the way the tree looked without so much linework on it, so I decided to remove some of it. Instead of erasing it, I added a Layer Mask to the lineart layer. By drawing black over the lines I wanted to get rid of, they would magically vanish, but they were not deleted. If I decided later I wanted them, I could simply draw white on the mask or discard the mask entirely.

I also colored some of the lines, by simply locking the layer transparency and drawing over the lines with the colors I wanted. This helps push some areas, like the leaves, into the background. Where they belong.

And that’s it! The result is the image at the top of the page. True, there is still much that could be done to improve it, but those are the basics of how I color an image. Please join me next time when I tell you how to prepare a dry-rub marinade for a rack of ribs.