I have been asked to make a tutorial showing how to colour in non Paint friendly linearts.
For a number of reasons, many artists dislike using non Paint Friendly linearts, whatever image program they’re using. This is because they are harder to colour, take longer and are much harder to fit nicely into a background. Put simply, they’re much less user friendly than Paint friendly linearts. But they do exist, and if you really want to use them you need to know how.
As always, I’ll be using Gimp 2.8 in this tutorial, but these steps are pretty much universal to all versions of Gimp. You can colour non Paint friendly linearts in MS Paint programs, but it is even harder and takes around 5 times as long.
Step 1:
Select your non Paint Friendly lineart. Here’s one I prepared earlier XD
Notice how pixelated the lines are when you zoom in. This is what makes it non Paint Friendly, and normally happens when the image is saved as a .jpeg rather than a .png, or if it is resized.
If you try to colour this lineart in using the ‘Fill Bucket tool’, you’ll only get white lines around the inside of the lineart, like this. Not only do they look rubbish, they are considered lazy and unprofessional by other artists, so it’s best to avoid this if possible.
Step 2:
Instead of using the Fill Bucket, we’re going to colour this image in the same way as outlined in
this guide, but without the step of making the background transparent. So, go to ‘Layers’ and click on ‘New Layer’.
Step 3:
Now go to the ‘Layers-Brushes’ box on the right of the screen, click on the new layer, go to ‘Mode’ and set it to ‘Multiply’.
Step 4:
Choose your colour, select either the ‘Paintbrush’ tool or the ‘Pencil’ tool and beginning filling in your lineart. You’ll notice that the white spaces will fill with colour without erasing your black lines. At this stage, you can be very careful and erase any colour that goes outside the lines as you go, or splat on the colour as you like and erase it all afterwards.
Step 5:
If any colour does go outside the lines, use the ‘Eraser’ tool to erase this, neatening up your image. It helps if you zoom in for this.
Step 6:
Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you’ve filled in your character with colour, remembering to do the eyes, nostrils, inner ears etc.
Step 7:
Right click on your colour layer in the ‘Brushes-Layers’ box, and click on ‘Merge Down’.
Step 8:
To add shading, repeat step 3. Then repeat steps 4 and 5, but using the ‘Airbrush’ tool and a pale grey colour. Blur the shading with the ‘Blur’ tool or the Gaussian Blur feature, explained in
this guide. Finally repeat step 7.
Background:
If your lineart already has a background you can ignore this part. The steps above are exactly the same for a plain background as a scenic background. However, if your image has a plain background, I strongly recommend you leave it with a plain background. If you try to make the background transparent and paste the image onto a scenic background, you’ll end up with white lines around your character, like this. This just looks horrible, and will spoil your final picture. It’s much better to leave the background white that end up with horrible white or coloured lines around your character. Sometimes you can get away with it, especially if the background is pale, but generally it just spoils the overall picture.
I hope this has helped. Like I said, it’s much easier to colour non Paint Friendly linearts in Gimp or Photoshop than Paint, since with Paint you’d have to individually colour every pixel by hand. But it’s still awkward and time consuming to colour them, even in GIMP or Photoshop, and that’s why most artists prefer Paint Friendly linearts.
