Welcome!

Well hello there! I'm Cady, and I'd like to welcome you to /~Gimplerz, a new spifftastic guide for how to color some of the pretty pictures you draw without any cost to you! It's still a fantastic work in progress, but feel free to browse what I have so far.

You don't need anything fancy or expensive like Photoshop; in fact, you don't need much more than you probably already have! Here are the materials:

Additionally, you may have a USB pen tablet or even a tablet computer. It makes coloring easier, but is not necessary to make pretty pictures.

You may be skeptical and think that only people with Photoshop can make gorgeous pictures. However, you will discover that GIMP is full of many similar tools and devices. I myself actually have a copy of Photoshop Elements, and I prefer GIMP. It keeps my computer running correctly. x) If you're interested, here are some pictures I've made with this amazing program -- drag and drop them into the address bar to see them up close!

And one more thing before we start: don't get discouraged if your art isn't OMGWOW right away. It takes practice and patience. I will give you some general guidelines and tips to help you get started, but don't be afraid to explore your own artistic side, even if you do run into a few bumps along the way.

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Updates

Well, I'm adding to this guide as much as I can, and I decided to keep an official update list. So here it is (:
  • 12/29/2010: Moved the page to /~Knowlies, got rid of some of the pesky non-working images, and made a spiffeh linkback button. :D Also, revamped the layout.
  • 06/13/2010: Added an updates page, as well as two hair techniques ^_^
More to come!

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Scanning the Picture

This is actually a very important step when it comes to digital coloring. If you scan the image wrong, it can have a huge impact on how difficult it will be shade and such. Many a promising image can be destroyed by a bad scan.

In addition, you should never take a digital image of your picture if you want to be able to color it well. It can be done, but your picture will just look cleaner if you don't have weird shadows falling over it everywhere. You can erase the shadows, true, but it's just a huge hassle.

So, place the picture that you want to color on your scanner and open the scanner program. I will be using a picture of a Draik design that I hope will turn out very cool-looking.

You will see several options on the screen. Although my scanner is probably different than yours, these options are nearly always there. Let's take a look at the most important ones. {drag + drop this screenie to see the full version.}

Awesome! So now your picture is uploaded and you're ready to start messing around in GIMP. So let's go to the GIMP, which you should have downloaded by now, and open the program. It takes a little while to open the first time, so give it a minute or two.

To open our file, we go to File ≥ Open and we find the file we're looking for.


All right! It's time to start playing with your image!

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Tidying Up Your Image

So now that you have the image open in GIMP, it's time to clean it up. Now, chances are that when you scanned your picture in, the computer messed it up some. Uggh. So you'll have to perform a few tasks to get it to coloring-quality.

Ew! The picture is upside down and there's a lot of extra stuff outside it that we don't need, not to mention the smudgy lineart! D: Let's fix it up.

First, we're going to rotate the image -- it's upside-down, and that isn't very aesthetic. Your scanner has a 50/50 chance of doing this, so if your image is right side up, you can skip to the next step, cropping.

So go to Image ≥ Transform ≥ Rotate 180°. This flips your image right-side-up.

Now let's get rid of all the lettering and extra space by cropping. This is an easy way to get rid of the outside edges of a picture you don't need.

When you first open the GIMP, there should be two windows besides the one with your picture in it. Go to the thinner one labeled the 'toolbox', shown to the left. You want to choose the tool that looks a bit like a knife. Now use your mouse to make a box around the part of the image you want to keep. Eliminate as much as you can without cutting off the subject of your picture.

Now, hit the "enter" or "return" key on your keyboard and vwalah! Your image shall be that much less junkyfied.

So now that we have most of the outside gone, we can focus on cleaning up what's left -- namely, the lineart and smudges.

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Saving

Coming soon!

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Smudges and Lineart

Now, before we start getting rid of the smudges, we'll want to change the mode of the image. Right now it's in an 'indexed' mode, which means the paint brush will end up all edgy and pixelly. To change the mode, go to Image ≥ Mode ≥ RGB. RGB basically means 'color mode'.

Now, Select the paintbrush tool. You can find this in the 'toolbox' -- it's the tool that looks, well, like a paint brush.

Let's take a look at the 'Tool Options'.
The Mode is the style you want to paint in. Use normal. I hardly ever use the other modes when playing with paintbrushes.
The Opacity is how see-through the paint brush will be. Don't worry about this one right now either.
The Brush is something you will be changing quite a bit. If you click on the little image with the circle, it will show you a bunch of different brushes you can use... [screenie] You will notice that the shaped brushes will have a format like this: "Shape (##)". They correspond to the shape of the brush and the pixel size of the brush -- notice that the default setting is "Circle (11)".
The Scale is also a really useful tool. It can be used to make brushes bigger than they normally are. For instance, if you have this 11-pixel brush and the scale is at 2.0, the brush will be 22 pixels. Make sense? Awesome.

Everything else in the tool options is for you to mess around and play with. I may add a 'special effects' section to the guide that will include some of these things, but not until the original guide is completed. Until then, feel free to play around with them. (Note: 'brush dynamics' will not be very useful unless you are using a tablet, as all those settings depend on pen pressure.)

So that's the brush tool. Very useful, very nice to have around, and the primary tool used when coloring digitally.

NOW we want all of your picture to be white for right now. So let's use the paintbrush tool to get rid of all those icky pencil smudges and such. For that, you'll want to change the paintbrush color to white. How? Go back to the toolbox. Right above your tool options are two boxes - one black and one white, and a double-headed arrow next to the two boxes. Click the arrow. Vwalah! You are now using white instead of black! We'll get into how to choose colors later.

A good strategy for doing cleaning up is using the zoom, which can be found on the bottom left corner of the window with the picture in it. You can zoom in to do more detailed work and zoom out to see the full impact of what you've done while zoomed in. Bear in mind -- your picture is huge, so you can see the whole thing when it's zoomed out to maybe 20% the size of the real image. A 100% zoom is perfect for detail work.



Before After!

Now, isn't that better?

This step can take a while, but be patient and don't erase things you need.

Finally, I like to go over my pencil lineart with a black or near-black paint brush, just so that I can define exactly where the lines are -- plus it makes erasing outside the lines a heck of a lot easier later. BUT DON'T START YET!

First, we're going to add something called a layer, which is full of awesometastic wonder. There will be a little more about layers later on, but for now all you have to do is create a new one. Go to Layers ≥ New Layer.

A dialogue box will pop up. If you want to, you can name your new layer. DO NOT MESS WITH THE WIDTH AND HEIGHT, and make sure that the 'transparency' option is chosen. This makes your new layer transparent so that you can see onto your pencil sketch layer.

Next, make sure that the new layer is selected, otherwise you will draw all over the old one. Not fun. How do you do that? Well, it's the one dialogue box we haven't come to yet -- the "Layers, Channels, Undo" one. It should be on the layers tab right now.

Now switch your paintbrush color back to black and go over the lines on your original sketch. Take care to connect the lines, it makes things much easier later if you have nice, definitive regions.

There! That brought out the lines and made everything much easier to see! Woohoo!

So, the line art is looking good; time to move on to the /really/ fun part: adding color!

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Layers: Your New Best Friend.

Layers are amazing. And glorious. And fantastical. They allow you to color outside the lines and still be able to fix it. They allow you to shade, brighten, and pretty much do anything you can think of in relation to coloring.

Remember how to make a new layer? Do the exact same thing as before...

Let's name this layer 'skin'. This layer will be -- you guessed it -- the layer with the skin color on it. So now go back to your Layers dialogue, and "Skin" should be right at the top. Now, highlight it and pay attention.

Change the mode of the layer to "Multiply". This is /exceedingly/ important. If the layer is in this mode, you can draw with pretty much any color (except black) and the black lines will show up under your coloring!

There are a bunch of other modes, which I may later add to the guide. However, I very rarely use them except for effects when I'm /not/ coloring. Feel free to mess around with them, though!

Now, when do you make the next layer? It depends on a few factors. I tend to create a new layer when I start coloring a different part of the body; for instance, in this picture I'll have a layer for the skin, the hair, the coat, the pants, and at least two layers for the car. I'll also add a layer for 'accessories' -- meaning his shoes and the flame shooting from his finger. I only suggest putting two aspects of the picture on the same layer if they are both (a) very small and (b) have a sizeable amount of distance between them.

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Oooh, pretty colors...

So, it's time to choose a color! How does one do this? Well, do you remember the white and black boxes that you used to switch colors when you were cleaning up? Now, click on the box that you can see all of. This box corresponds to the foreground color, the color that will be used to paint with.

When you click on the box, a dialogue box will pop up looking something like this:

You can change the color with the slider on the right and the shade by clicking on an area in the box of color. I'm going to go with blue for my Draik's color.

Now, scribble over the parts that are skin. It doesn't matter if you go outside the lines -- in fact, it's preferable if you want to shade in a specific way that I will discuss in the next section. This is what my Draik looks like now:

Continue on to learn about shading and the magical tool known as the "Gaussian Blur."

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Shade & Blur

We have a base color, but that looks rather flat at the moment; w'ere going to add some new colors to make the picture seem to 'pop' more.

Remember the pop-up color box? Go back to that. Now take note of where the little crosshair is. The best way to choose darker and lighter shades to shade with is to move diagonally. For a lighter shade, go down and right. For a darker shade, go up and left. Mess around with colors a bit!

Now, for the actual shading... I sort of make it up as I go. I pretened there's a light source somewhere -- in this case, the upper right hand corner of my picture, and correspond loosely to that. The shading is mostly to give the picture depth. Although right now it looks a little funky...

We want the skin to be smooth and nice to look at. In order to do this, we need to use "Gaussian Blur", which you can find by going to Filters ≥ Blur ≥ Gaussian Blur.

The following dialogue box will pop up. Adjust the pixel values based on what you see in the preview -blocked- You don't want your colors to be separate, but at the same time you don't want them too blurred; go for somewhere in between.

Now, here's the reason you need to color outside the lines. When you blur, the program will basically blur the blue pixels with the transparent ones. If you don't want transparent edges on your image, then you need to make sure that the color spills over the lines by a pretty decent amount.

Now all we need to get rid of all of that extra color! Continue on.

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Deleting Extra Color

Colors outside the lines are never fun, and this is no exception. But how do you get all the skin color to go away?

While you could always erase with the eraser tool, this gets really boring and tedious. Instead, we're going to use a tool called the magic wand. Well, technically it's called the fuzzy select tool. Go to the toolbox to find it now. It's the tool that looks like a magic wand (hence the unofficial name).

Now -- and this is very important -- make sure that you have the layer that you traced your lineart onto is selected. You can tell if it's selected by looking at the 'Layers, Channels, and Paths' dialogue box; the same one that you used to set your 'Skin' layer to multiply mode. The layer that you are currently drawing/erasing on is highlighted in grey.

Now that you have your lineart layer highlighted, it's time to use the magic wand. This tool selects contiguous regions; regions that are separated by lines. In the lineart layer, that means that it will only select the area between the lines you drew over your original pencil sketch.

I usually start with the largest area and work backwards.I'm going to select the background by clicking on any part of it. The selected region is outlined by a dashed, moving line.

See how it only selected the continuous region of the background? All it took was one click!

Now, to actually erase the color, go back to the 'skin' layer, making sure not to click anywhere on your picture with the magic wand tool. Now press the "delete" key, and poof!

Now repeat the same steps for the other regions of the body that have extra blue in them.

Helpful Hint: Hold down the shift key as you click to select multiple regions simultaneously!

When you are done, the picture should look something like this...

Now it's still a little messy since the magic wand tool isn't perfect; it has a tendency to leave a few colors here and there and makes some of the lineart jagged and icky. But a few minutes with the eraser tool should clear that up...

Oooh, pretty.

Now, do the last three steps for the remaining sections you have to color of your main subject(s). We'll get to backgrounds a bit later.

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Techniques for Foregrounds

Obviously, you don't color all things the same. There are a few different techniques here I can show you, to be used for any subject you color.

|| Hair 1 || Hair 2 || Scales || Sparkley Fabric ||

If you think of something you'd like me to feature here, please shoot me a neomail!

Hair - Technique 1

This type of hair I use mostly for girls, or for pictures that I haven't drawn hair on yet. For lineart hair, I use a different style, which can be found in the next section.

To start us out on hair, I quick-sketched a female face. Let's call her Amy.

Amy has no hair right now, she's just made up of solid black lines. Let's color her up a bit, shall we? I decided to give her red hair.

Make a new transparent layer, but don't set the mode to multiply. Just leave the mode at normal -- or rather, don't do anything. Take a brush (I prefer the fuzzy brush) and outline the general shape of her hair like so:

Now she has a base color for her hair. Hooray! She's no longer bald. But her hair looks rather flat and two-dimensional. Hair is usually full of highlights and shading and fun things like that; let's give her some!

Remember how we changed the color darker and ligher by moving diagonally when we were shading the skin? Choose a color lighter than the base hair color you just brushed down.

Now, take a smaller brush -- I usually use the 1-pixel brush -- to use as individual strands of hair. You want to brush out from where the hair originates along the part, usually along the top of the head or slightly to the side. This where we want our hair to originate from:

Take the small brush and draw some lighter strands into Amy's hair, like so.

Now do the same thing with a bunch of other different colors. I usually come back to a lighter color and go over the places where light hits the hair the most. Just play around with it! Do what looks good. Here's my finished picture of Amy.

Hair - Technique 2

This technique works very well when you already have hair drawn in. I love to use it for my adoptables -- it means I don't have to re-color the hair every time. Here's an example of a wocky adoptable I've made using this:

For this one, I've decided to rope Amy's friend, Ashley, into helping us understand. She's wearing pigtails today.

Make a new layer and change the mode to 'Multiply'. We're first going to color Ashley's hair exactly the same way we colored the Draik's skin up there. First you choose a base color and vary it to shade it a bit...

And then we use the gaussian blur and magic wand tools to smooth her hair over and get rid of the extra.

Now her hair looks a bit like a hard shell over her head. We're going to fix that. Make a new layer and change the mode to Overlay.

This makes darker colors darken what you're coloring over and lighter colors lighten what you're coloring over. For example:

Again, just play around with it. I like to stick with grey colors, which simply darken and lighten. To change greys, just go along the bottom of the color-changing panel. Experiment away! Here's my finished picture of Ashley.

Scales!

coming le soon. 8)

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Filters

If you're ever hankering to make something look cool without even having to draw anything, filters are usually what you want. They're how I made the banner right at the top of this page! No art or anything, just messing around with filters for a while. ^^

Under construction.

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Backgrounds

There are a variety of ways to put your subjects in interesting environments, and here I shall reveal some of my secrets.

Possible bg tutorials:

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Finishing Your Picture

So you've finished your image and are ready to save and upload it. Awesome! There are a few things you'll want to do first, though.

1. Save as .xcf.
First, you'll want to save your image one last time as a .xcf file. This ensures that you can go back and work on it if you don't like how the image works in your layout and such. If you don't remember how to save as .xcf, go back here.

2. Flatten Image.
This is a very useful technique, especially when using "Multiply" layers. It merges all of the layers together. To do this, you go to Image ≥ Flatten Image.

3. Save As...
Now you're going to actually save the picture! Go to File ≥ Save As:

This dialogue box will pop up:

Now, click the second line -- The one that says "Save as File Type (By Extension)". It should pop up with a list of file types to save your image as.

The major types that people usually save their pictures as are as follows: .gif, .jpg/.jpeg, and .png. I always save my big pictures as .png; it preserves the quality the best in my opinion. The only time I use .jpg/.jpeg is for the Beauty contest, and I only use .gif for animations.

Here's a pretty flower in each of the file types...

.gif image .jpg/.jpeg image .png image

See how much prettier the .png image is?

One more thing worth noting: .jpg/.jpeg images cannot handle transparency. If you want a transparent backround, do NOT save your image as .jpg.

So once you click "Save" on the dialogue box, another two or three boxes will come up, different depending on what you're saving it as. I just hit "OK"; the default settings are almost always what you need.

Vwalah! You now have an image stored on your computer, ready to be uploaded. 8)

4. Uploading
Now that you have an image, you need to get it online so everyone can see it! This is usually done by uploading it to a website. As to which website -- there are tons... ask around the Neoboards to find out which one you think would suit you best!

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Problems?

If you find something completely baffling you, check right here first before neomailing me. It's quite possible that someone has had your problem already and I have it answered here! If you still can't find it, go ahead and shoot me a neomail.

Well, seeing as there have been no issues brought up... neomail me if you have a problem. xDD

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Fanmail and More

This is a shout-out to all you guys who make me happy that I'm doing this guide. High fives and lots o' love to you!

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Fan Gallery

Did you use this guide to help you create a picture? If you want, you can have it displayed right here! Just send me a neomail letting me know where I can find the picture and I'll put it up along with your name.

Thank you to Melissa for this idea!

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Frequently Asked Questions

Will you draw my pet?
Sometimes; it depends on several factors including school, travel, and sometimes just plain laziness. I might also be absorbed in another project like an application or one of my own petpages. Check out the Requests portion of this page to see if I'm taking art requests or trades right now.

Can I use your coding/art/writing?
The answer to this is NO. I do all these by myself, and I would really appreciate it if you respect that.

Pirates or Ninjas?
Ninjas ALL THE WAY.

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Art Requests and Trades

Every now and again I'll get it inside my head that I feel like doing art for someone. Just because I can.

Status: Closed
Received: 0
In Progress: 0
Completed: 0

Hate to bring this up, but I'm going to be a lazy bum about art requests until this guide is mostly finished. D: Sorry!

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So Long, Farewell...

Well it was nice seeing you here, and I do hope you'll return! I even have a very nifty-looking linkback button that you can take and put on your user lookup, petpage, pet lookup, or whatever ^.^


Have a great day!

Credits

All coding, drawings, screenies, and everything on this page was made by Cady unless otherwise specified. Don't steal kthx.

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