Scanning and Coloring Your Artwork - Adobe Photoshop Tutorial

Jacquelin Vanderwood June 1, 2003 1 What we want to do in this lesson is scan our artwork and then color it professionally. Below is the initial grayscale scan. What we want to do is turn it into a black and white scan. 2 Here we have the black and white scan. As you can see it needs some cleaning up and some fixing. 3 Select the Eraser tool. Go ahead and begin erasing the extra pencil marks. When that is complete, select the Brush tool, and change the foreground color to black. Fill in the disconnected areas. Now once you're satisfied, change the bitmap picture to grayscale then to RGB. 4 Use Color Range and select the white areas. Press OK. 5 Invert the selection and right-click and select Layer via Copy. I've added a solid white background on another layer. 6 Using the Magic Wand tool select all the areas that you will be painting the same color. 7 Expand the selection by 2 pixels. Create a new layer. Drop that layer below the line layer. 8 Fill the selection with the selected color. 9 Create a new layer above the filled in layer. Select a darker shade of the previous gray and add shadowing. Then select a lighter shade to add highlight. You will notice that I didn't do the coloring very well. Here's the secret: While pressing Alt hold the mouse cursor between the two layers (the original gray layer and the highlighted layer). You'll see the cursor change. When it changes, click. As if supernaturally the mess is gone. At this point you can use a Gaussian blur to blend. Use the same method to fill in the nose area as well. You always want to have a flat base layer to work from so you'll need that for the nose as well as the dress otherwise this method won't work. 10 Let's use the same method for the dress. Remember to create a new layer above the one we just did. Once you have completed the full body and clothing, you can then go back to each indented layer and add a new layer to add more highlight and/or detail to each piece. You can even use filters to add effects such as I did in the decoration of the dress. I've got two layers above the mouse body: the highlighted areas on one layer and the smaller details on a layer above that. Remember to indent the new hightlight or detail layer as you go along. If you put a patch of color down but it's to dark just use Fade to adjust it.   Copyright 2003, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved