Header image; art by REFF Annie Rodrigue
      "White Out or White Gouache are your friends!!!!!" — Maïna  

    STEP 8-III: Coloring Hair in Painter, Part 3

  In this step, I'm going to assume that you have a pressure sensitive tablet, at least Wacom Graphire, but preferably Intuos (I use Wacom Intuos 8x6). Using Painter without a pressure sensitive tablet is generally not something fun to do. ^^;



  We'll learn how to add subtle, delicate highlights to the hair and pick up some tips on how to customize your Painter brushes appropriately. Select the Pen brush, and for the sub-brush, select Pen and Ink. Go to Windows> and open up all the brush control windows if you don't have them open. You should have four brush control windows plus the color wheel window open: like this.

  The window with green header is just there to show you what the Pen brush looks like. ^^ Now, the bright pink/purple window is the Sliders; if you couldn't find where to open that one, it's under Controls> in the green header window. By default, Pen and Ink brush has "Size" set at "Velocity" - this means the thickness of your line changes depending on how fast you draw the line. The faster you move your stylus, the thinner the line will be. I personally find it rather difficult to control, so my Pen and Ink brush has Size set at Pressure . With this, the thickness of my line changes depending on how hard I press down the stylus on the tablet. Opacity's default for Pen and Ink is None if I remember correctly; this means the darkness of the line won't change no matter what you do. This can create anti-aliasing problems under some circumstances, so I set the Opacity at Pressure, which means the harder I press it, the darker the line will be. The yellow-headered size window should be familiar to you; I want the finest details and the best control possible for the strands, so I put something less than 2.0 for Size, and the maximum value for ± size.



  This procedure is a bit similar to the shading we did in part 2, except it's... "backwards" and it uses Pen and Ink brush. Also you'll probably want to get more careful this time. Remember how we put the shading in the lower right part of the each "chunk" of hair? This time, since highlighting is reflection of light, we'll be putting highlights on the upper left part of those "chunks." If you're a bit confused about what I mean by chunks of hair, click here for a graphical explanation. Again, you can click on the image to the right for a closeup.
subtle highlights



  Now, select the eraser brush, and select the sub-brush Fat Bleach. Softly rub the Bleach around the parts you want to put some extra highlights. Press the stylus extra gently so that the highlighting doesn't seem to show up until you rub the same area a few times; this will result in better saturation of colors (in other words, more variation of colors; click here to see the difference between weak-pressured bleaching and heavily pressured bleaching). Increasing the brush size (the main brush size, not the ± size) by 5-10 might help achieving better saturation.

soft highlights



  We're almost there! Now we'll add extra highlight details using Ultrafine Bleach. Just like the Fat Bleach, Ultrafine Bleach is also a sub-brush of Eraser. Since this is a "detail" procedure just like what we did with Pen and Ink, we'll change the settings of Ultrafine Bleach to something similar we had for Pen and Ink. Here is the screenshot for my settings.

  Try to repeat quick but gentle (as in week pressure) strokes, but not as weakly as with Fat Bleach. As for where to apply the Ultrafine Bleach, upper left of the chunks (the part we highlighted with Pen and Ink) is good in general, but try other areas too for some experimental, interesting result. As usual, you can click on the image to the right for a closeup.
fine highlights



my product!   And finally, here's the complete picture. The hair has been touched up with Photoshop's Sponge tool at Saturate mode. (It's a very useful tool for touching up Painter stuff, BTW. ^_^) Feel free to post your own version of the picture used in this tutorial, as long as your version has been colored completely by you - in other words, don't add more stuff to one of my half-finished versions then post it. Please note that full credit should be given: include the info that the line art was done by me (Keiiii), and a link back to the main page of Cozy Paper (http://www.cozypaper.com), my personal art site.

  Click on the image for the full picture.


[[ Go Back <<< >>> Proceed ]]

Step One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight

[ Back ]      

----------------

© 1999-2001 The Art Corner and REFFs

The design/contents of this Web site may not be used/reproduced
without prior permission from the REFFs.

For our complete copyright info/disclaimer, click here.