Lore Rekindled Ama - Blog Posts

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How do you draw colors-of-the-rainbow characters? (I mean like characters with blue or purple or pink skin, and so on)

Do you draw them with the color of their skin and then clean it up? Or do you draw them with black, color it in, and then get rid of the outline? I'm really curious!

I use base colors and 'sculpt' the shapes out that I need, then I go over them with lineart where necessary! Usually all my base colors are on one layer unless I need to make a separate one (sometimes for hair or props I'll do it to ensure I can mess with them as much as I like without affecting the base colors but they'll usually be merged by the end). Sometimes I'll have to tweak things during the lineart stage that don't work as well as I thought they would while flatting but I've gotten pretty good at blocking out poses and proportions with flat colors, it works really well for my brain :' ) After that I shade on a clipped layer (meaning the shading won't travel outside of the base color) by using the magic wand selection tool to select what parts I want to shade at a time (again the skin and hair and clothing are all usually on one layer). I have specific colors saved in my CSP palettes for base colors, shading tones, highlight tones, etc. so it all stays pretty consistent unless we need to specifically change the coloring to match mood lighting or whatnot (and even then we won't change the coloring itself, we'll just use post-editing tricks like color balancing and effects layers!)

Here's Persephone's as an example:

And even then I actually only really use the last 6 colors (so not the first 4 from the left moving right) because some of those colors were picked from the pilot episodes that I wound up not using but kept anyways for stuff like glow effects (you should see the amount of colors I have for Hades that I don't use regularly LMAO he's gone through sooo many palette shifts through the course of LO). The three shades of pink at the far right end (going from right to left) are for her skin > skin shading and hair > hair shading, the off white color is for the whites of her eyes (and I use this color for basically every other character as well), and the dark color is for the lineart (it's not black, just a very very dark magenta). Every character has a unique color for their lineart, usually just a very dark color of their base skin tone !