Finally we add all the layers together. Do touch up in places that are empty. Add a background.

If I’d been doing this illustration for a client I would have added a few more touches. There are some obvious (to me) places that aren’t colored. I had been waited to do them until I finished the fun stuff but with the amount of corruption I was having to clean up everytime I opened the file I just decided that I could live with “unfinished” bits.

The next color layer is the airbrush at 40%. This both deepens the shadows and softens their edges once I put all the layers together.

I create further layers of color with the brush tool and my WACOM tablet. These are the same colors as the flat color layer. Once I combine the layers this will be the darkest shadow layer.

The next phase of coloring is to copy the first color layer and to erase away the areas that would be reflecting the most light. As you can see, some of the characters no longer have any color on them. This was one of the last layers I completed and it suffered the most from file corruption. Rather than continue to fix the corrupted areas I simply removed the color from the characters that I thought didn’t need them.

The next few posts are going to make it look like I colored this in an orderly fashion. This wouldn’t be accurate. I often jump between layers and change techniques as I go along. I may have to be more orderly in the future though. My ancient iMac is having trouble processing files larger than 100 megs. Lately large files have gotten corrupted and I’ve had to spend part of my work time correcting the corruption before I could do new work.

Anyway. The first step in coloring is to lay down color. If you use all the colors of the rainbow you’ll find your illustration looks awfully busy. Less is more, y’know. Usually I pick a color range I’m going to use predominately (in this case, uh, gray, maybe) and a color range I’m going to avoid (red and green).