Said I'd post something about the color process, so here it is! It's a lot simpler than the previous posts, but hopefully there are still some info/tricks in there that might be of some use to some of you.
I start by coloring a full single frame to determine the palette, that ends up being something like this:
For the cel-shading aesthetic, I use two-tone shades for each different color type: one for base (=light), one for shadows, and possibly one extra for highlights on specific spots (remember, this isn't a coloring process for a single illustration, details WILL kill you. You're going to be doing this over and over and over so the less colors you have, the faster it'll go/the better you'll feel overall).
To get shadow colors, I use the HSB selection:
For the light tones, I generally try to stay around the 30-45 saturation range. Figuring out "your" range is how you get an homogenous palette overall, and having that is a big part of having a cohesive aesthetic. So this part is pretty important!
For the shadow tint, I overall raise the saturation by a couple %, and decrease the brightness by a couple more (generally 2x the raise for saturation).
HOWEVER, and this is where it's important, it's also quite good to change the hue a bit: to the left if you want something "darker", or to the right if you want something lighter (or at least, that's how I interpret it). The slight difference in hue between the light and shadow will help add volume. Since you only have two tones, you have to pick them carefully!
Once you have your palette, I find it best to make it into a set of swatches, like so:
(Here, the Big Blue palette are the bottom two lines - the others above are other palettes for other chars).
Now that you have your palette handy and swatched, it's time to start painting all of the remaining frames!
The process is fairly simple: first paint in the base color, then your shade tint using the mask layers I talked about in a previous post.
In detail: to paint the base layer, I tried several processes, but I find the one that works best is using the lasso tool while zoomed in to have leeway in your precision when tracing the line, then filling it in with the color pot. For smaller details/patches of color, though, directly painting it can be just as fast. Your mileage may vary!
The main idea here for speed's sake is to keep the same color selected for as long as you can, to avoid going back and forth to your swatches and swapping tools. This is why I do a layer of the color for each frame of the animation: here, I'll do the skin light tone for each frame, before moving on to shadowing, etc. Like so:
I eventually fill in the other colors, following a non-adjacent color principle: I'll put on the same layer most of the colors that are generally non adjacent. There will be some overlap during specific moves, of course, but we're trying to design a generic process here!
The other thing to note is that as I add more layers, I try to eventually merge them down when I complete a cycle (reach the end of the animation and get back to the beginning for a new layer). I keep the skin layer separate, but for everything regarding clothing, I eventually merge it down into a single layer to save on memory use.
As you're trucking along in might be a good idea to toggle the background between two different contrasted colors to see what's out of the lines, if you care about having eveything fit in.
The last step is to add some simple gradients to add some volume with a low time cost. Again, mask layers are key!
And this is the end result:
That's about it, really. It's a lot of cycling over and over the whole animation, slowly filling in the colors, and trying to be as efficient with your hand movement as possible. The more mechanical and mindless the process becomes, the faster it goes! Hopefully, with all that, you too can become an unfeeling, uncaring coloring machine!
