a little shade of gray

tin came over today to hang out. expected arrival time was 1-ish, but she didn't show up until about 3.30. not surprised; that's very typical of her. while waiting, however, i somehow got over my laziness and started drawing sanji on a piece of paper. the only reason for this was because i wasn't satisfied with the color job i did yesterday.

paintpixel has a tutorial on how to color and shade, but they give no guideline on how to choose the correct shade for a color. nor do they give recommendations on skin color, because that's hella hard to choose. there are gazillions of them to choose from. well, basically the only thing useful i got out of that site is on HOW TO CREATE AN OUTLINE. select RGB channel, good to know.

paintpixel's tutorial showed a method they call "cel-style" which i haven't tried yet since i'm not particularly fond of pen tool, but i tried their "airbrush shading" and i sucked at it. just look at the sanji coloring from yesterday. apparently i'm not artistic enough to be able to pick the correct colors for shades, so i literally gave up that method. maybe i'll take it up again, after i'm better at coloring.

today i figured that maybe i should invent my own method of coloring. i've been using photoshop for over 6 years now, i should be able to fix something up. so i invented this hue-method. it's really nothing special; those of you who are familiar with photoshop should be able to guess what this coloring method is. the only this that makes this method might not be preferable to some is that YOU HAVE TO FIRST SHADE THE DRAWING YOURSELF. if you don't shade it, it won't work.

so i spent about a little over an hour to get this drawn:



and then a little over 2 hours to get it colored:



i don't know about you, but i like this much much better than the airbrush coloring method.

what i did was basically this: create the transparent outline for the picture and put it on a new layer. then create three more copies of the original picture underneath the outline layer. use one for the hair, one for the skin, and the other one for the shirt. use polygonal lasso tool to create a selection of the area you want to colorize, then hit ctrl+U or image > adjustment > hue/saturation. check the colorize box and adjust the hue, saturation, and lightness the way you want it to be. if you cannot find a good setting, pick the closest one and then adjust the levels (ctrl+L or image > adjustment > levels). works out good for me.

here is the hue/saturation setting with the colorize option checked.

SKIN: HUE +38 SATURATION +49 LIGHTNESS -3
HAIR: HUE +57 SATURATION +90 LIGHTNESS -50
SKYPIEA: SHIRT HUE +341 SATURATION +85 LIGHTNESS -45
TONGUE: HUE +360 SATURATION +40 LIGHTNESS -20
GUM: HUE +350 SATURATION +55 LIGHTNESS -30

the tongue and gum are on the same layer as the skin. try it if you like. use the grayscale image from above and color it the way you want it. i was using photoshop 7.0, if you didn't know.

on a side note, it's nice to have someone IM you with these

bOba oN iCe: 143 edo
bOba oN iCe: 637
bOba oN iCe: and i'm 823

the numbers are supposed to be pager codes, back from the days when we didn't have text messaging. urbandic has the meaning to them.