Section
Lesson 1
Editing Manga
Okay, if you're here, you are either completly lost in navigating my site, (my fault, sorry), or you want to learn the ancient art of COLORING MANGA. See, I say ancient, when it really isn't. At least not for me. I've only been doing this for a short time, not even a year when I made this tutorial. And see how far I've progressed? You too can do well in the world of COLORING MANGA by following this easy to follow tutorial!! What I will provide here is a step-by-step guide to help you learn to do this stuff on your own. Of course, I am not sure if anybody will take this seriously, 'cause I sure won't, but oh well.
Read on, fellow artists!!
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Step One This step requires the aquisition of a computer, and the necessary components for creating/editing manga. I use a Gateway computer, with Adobe Photoshop 3.0 to edit the pictures, but any similar paint program would work. I haven't yet tried to make one with Microsoft Paint, (...the worst paint program ever created...), but I'm sure it would work if you had enough patience. |
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Step Two This step involves finding the fanscanned manga out there. Sites such as Planet Namek provide you with these images, so you should really go out there and get some.....like now.....go. ....waits around tapping foot.... Got some? Allright, pick an image you want to color, and let's go on. |
Step Three  Okay, now that you've got some fanscanned manga, and have picked the image you want to use, we are ready to begin. I chose this image for the tutorial because it is a rather simple picture. First off, make sure that the image is in a color (RGB) form, and not in black and white or grayscale. This allows you to **gasp** add color to the image. If you do not do this, then any colors you choose will be added as either grays or blacks. Since most DBZ manga is sent in black and white format, make sure that you do this. Your next step is to edit, or whiten out, any parts that are black and that you wish to add color to. Beginning with white, I use a line tool to outline the places I want to erase. After I have outlined the areas I want to color, I paint them white and go on. If you want to freehand, though, feel free. I'm not here to hold your hand. Expirement. Try stuff. |
Step Four
Now that you have an outlined black and white picture, it is time to color it in. From here, you get to chose your colors. Now I know that Microsoft Paint doesn't exactly have the best choice of colors, but if that's what you're using, then you'll have to make with what you have. If you do not know what color the various DBZ characters clothes/accessories are, I suggest keeping a catalogued section of all the characters on your hard drive for reference. Once you have your choice of colors picked out, we fill in out respective areas with the colors. Looks pretty good, eh? Now we go on to step five.
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Step Five
From here, we begin to add the shading. This tutorial deals with normal comic or cartoon shading. The shadows and highlights are added in block format, as opposed to gradiated shading.You definitely want to have an idea of where the light source is coming from when you do this. If a character is powering up, for instance, you should probably have the illumination from in front of the character. Other than that, it's your choice. For the primary shading color, I chose a darker variation of the main color, and began to draw the outline of where I wanted the shading to go. I also use the line tool here. Note to Photoshop Users: If you select only the area you want to edit with the wand tool, this is a lot easier. Notice the eyes have a slight grey shadow. Don't forget that. Once you have the areas you want shaded blocked out, by all means, fill them in. This step requires some knowledge of color theory, although you can wing it pretty good. You may have to try a few different shades and tones of colors to get the ones you want. |
Step Six
In this step, you can create even more depth and realism to your image. If the image looks fine after Step 5, go ahead and hit Step 7 and do the background without worrying about further shading/highlights. In Step 6, you should add highlights, and further shadows in the same methods as above.In DBZ characters, the highlights usually appear high on the cheek under the eye or on the chin, and sometimes on the back of the neck. The highlights should be lighter than the main skin tone, but not as drastic of a change as the shadows were. These highlights are usually only on the skin or armor. Clothing usually does not have highlights. The second shading color should also not be as pronounced as the first. You can continue to add various shades of colors to the shading, but I usually find two to be sufficient. |
Step Seven
The background can be anything you want it to, but it should not detract from the main image. In this image, I chose to add some lens flares to a black background, because the original picture had stars in the background. The lens flares allowed Goku's hair to stand out from the rest of the bg, and I think it turned out rather well.If you do not have the wonderful oppertunity to use programs like Adobe, that allow you to edit images with these so-called "Eye-Candy" things, you can still do some cool stuff. My Edited gallery has plenty of examples of how you can mess with a bg without the eye-candy. |
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This concludes my first tutorial on how to edit manga. I hope you learned something, or do not feel like you just wasted a lot of time here. An excellent example of these techniques applied in a bigger way is here: 
This picture is for Akire's September coloring contest. The picture has some bad quality here, but that is because I shrank it 50%. Well, that was fun, eh? If people give positive feedback about this section, I might improve/expound upon it. Of course, I do not really have that much else to say in this section, but rest assured, if something new does pop up, I'll get right on it. This was just something for me to do on a lazy Sunday, but I hope it turned out okay. |