Jungle Boy: Part 1

The next project... a wild young man, before he was king. In an attempt to share my process, I will be taking you step by step through my digital coloring methodology. It is by no means cast in stone, in fact, it changes regularly. Each piece seems to demand its own approach. Maybe it will be useful to others, else it will at least be amusing...

	The pencil drawing comes first. This was done on A4 paper with a medium pencil and as you can see I still suck at drawing hands. The drawing gets traced with a black fineliner on a new sheet and scanned at 300dpi in greyscale. To get the line art pure black on white I adjust the values "Image, Adjustments, Levels..." in Photoshop, it also removes the paper texture. Next any unwanted marks are erased manually.
	Use the "Channels" tab and click on the "Load channel as selection" circle at the bottom. Create a new layer, invert the selection and fill it with 100% black. Deselect and go back to the original layer. Fill it with 100% white - you now should have a layer with clean line art and a seperate background layer. Change the file "Image, Mode, RGB or CMYK Color" and save it.
	Loverboys taught me not to work on a large scale early on. I get lost in the detail and take too long - but that could just be me! For this I resize the image and reduce it to a more manageable scale. On a seperate layer below the line art I create a base colour using a large round brush and trim it to match the outlines. I choose a basic palette for the background, and lay down a few rough brush strokes (brush set to 50% opacity). Save often!

MORE LATER...