This Is Why You Duplicate Your Layers Before Merging Them Children - Tumblr Posts

you followed me aaaaa I love your art so much!!! may I ask a process question? I adore colored lineart but I can't seem to figure out when to color it, do you do your lineart in black first and then color it, or do you color your sketch and then at the same time choose the colors of the lineart or is it something totally different???

Hiii! I thought I followed you months ago, sorry (╥﹏╥). Your shuake art is immaculate.

About colored line art, you might want to ask around because I think my method is kind of unorthodox (read: sent by the devil himself), but I’ll try to explain it anyways.

I pick the colors both before and after I do the flats, but mostly after. I do the first pass of line art in a solid color, usually pink or blue although I think anything that’s not green or yellow works, and then I fill in the flats. My flats and lines look like this:

Then I merge those two layers together and do basic shading with a clipped multiply layer. If you’re going for a cleaner look, I would suggest not merging these two and clipping the multiply to the flat colors layer underneath the line art, but I like the little color variations I get when the multiply crosses over the lines, so I do it on top.

And then I merge that down and start rendering. This is when I color all the lines. I just paint over them on that merged normal layer, but if you’re going for a cleaner look, I would again suggest not merging the layers together. Do your rendering underneath the line art with a clipped layer and then color the lines separately, either by clipping a normal layer to it or by alpha locking the line art layer and just coloring directly onto it.

And then I merge that down and put a bunch of filtering layers over it (soft light and add in this case). I would actually suggest merging your layers down at this point (you should probably duplicate them first though) so that you can clip the filter layers to them and have the filters affect both the line art and the actual colors. It makes it look a lot more cohesive that way.

And bam! That’s the final result!

Hopefully that helped?