tutorial: coloring disney
At Ask the Maker, kirtash_girl asked for a guide on how I color Disney icons. When I started working on this I didn't expect it to be as wordy as it ended up, so I'm sorry for the TL;DR crowd! I also took into consideration some critique from my last tutorial and so this is more image heavy and less link heavy. Hopefully that's a bit more helpful. C:
Coloring Disney, for me, is very consistent. I've gotten really comfortable over the years with how I work on Disney caps, have experimented with what works (for me) and what makes me cringe. This guide looks a bit different than the last one, probably because I'm more sure of my abilities when it comes to Disney. If you have any further questions feel free to ask!
So. Bringing out colors! :D
OH AND PS: I wrote most of this at like 3am so if anything doesn't make sense please let me know! I've read over it a few times and it seems~ fine but I'm sure I've probably missed something. Thanks!
STANDARD COLORING
PREPPING
is a lot of fun when your screencaps are this colorful
Disney screencaps are probably the only time, in my newer icons, where I prep with screen/soft light layers. And it is beauuuutiful to look at.
base: starting prep was a Vibrance layer (vibrance +100) set to Screen and 20% opacity, just to start brightening up the colors a bit
1. CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E twice. Set the bottom layer to Screen and the top layer to Soft Light. Use Gaussian Blur on both layers.
2. This is what you've got. Some areas are a bit too bright though - such as the sky and Carl's face. Create a layer mask on the screen layer and, using a black brush with a lowered opacity (around 35% work well, imo), brush over those parts until that's toned down. My layer mask ended up looking like this
3. CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E again, this time using Sharpen and lowering the layer's opacity to 50%. Sharpening with Disney icons can be tricky. It's really, really easy to get oversharpened icons when working with Disney. And often, it's not needed at all. I've actually only recently started sharpening my Disney icons and ONLY because I started also actively liking sharper icons. So that I sharpen my Disney icons at all is totally a personal preference. I would say, if you're starting out, watch the sharpening like a hawk. LIKE. A HAWK.
If you DO find that it's oversharpened after a point, sometimes you can offset that with a ctrl+shift+alt+e layer on soft light with a heavy gaussian blur - but that can also come back and bite you, as I've found that sometimes makes the outlines for characters in certain films thin out and look strange. But basically. Oversharpening. Don't do it.
This is basically where I'm like "Ok! This image is ready for more fun things!" or alternatively "Ok! This icon can be done!" if I'm feel very lazy at the time. But I really want to make these colors pop WHICH LEADS TO A REALLY FUN PART. YOU'LL LIKE THIS, I PROMISE.
COLOR BLOBS!!
Ohmygosh I love this part so much sometimes. ♥___♥
When working with blobs of color, I'm not a huge perfectionist with it. I like it when the colors bleed a bit. Sometimes it looks really cool with animation, so I roll with it. Othertimes I get way up close with a hard round brush and get every little pixel nook and cranny. But with this one, this one I knew I wanted fun with colors. Also in this case, I didn't want to color over Carl. I wanted the background jungle to pop out and those colors to be the focus. So Carl got shafted here sorry, Carl.
4. I grab a soft round brush with full opacity and use the eyedropper tool to select colors from the image that are BRIGHT and that I want to be brought out. So with the bushes, for example, I went with one of the yellow-greens instead of the actual yellow because I wanted the greens to be more of a focus there. I brush around Carl with these various colors, each color getting its own layer. Each color blob layer then gets set to Soft Light.
Under the cut are the four different colors I've used. While they are each in their own layer while working on the icon, I've shown how they build up because I thought that may be more helpful:
5. MORE BLOBS! Kind of. CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E. With a large (40-60px) soft round brush with a lowered opacity (30-45%) I highlight some part where I think light would hit. Which since I've never taken any classes or anything that would teach me how to learn that, it's really all just "Oh this will look nice here maybe hopefully". The layer ends up looking like this and I set it to Soft Light. I put a liiiitttle bit of masking over Carl's face/hair (seriously small, here's the layer mask).
And that's the end of the blobs! :D Which is bringing us ever so much closer~~ to when I'm done with Disney icons. Hopefully y'all still like them when you know how easy this all really is trololol
TEXTURES R FUN
6. Textures. I don't like it when the textures are overpowering everything else, at least with Disney icons, so I try to keep it simpler~ish. My favorite types of textures are paintstroke (especially tinebrella's) and gritty neutral colored one (like this of deny1984 which tbh is one of my favorite textures E V E R). OK SORRY I DID KIND OF RAMBLE BUT ANYWAY. YES.
For this icon, I used three textures with the following settings:
by tinebrella, Soft Light
by tinebrella, Screen
by smyra0, Soft Light
I use layer masks on all three textures. The layers end up looking like this.
FINAL STEPS~ IDK WHAT TO NAME THIS PART
7. CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E. Use Gaussian Blur (radius 7) and set the layer to Soft Light
8. CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E. Sharpen and lower to layer's opacity to 10%.
Other icons that utilized color blobs:
COLOR BALANCE & GRADIENTS
I don't tend to use color blobs as much here (avoiding steps 3 and 4 from the previous column.). Instead, I use a combination of Color Balance and gradient maps.
With Color Balance, I don't really have any suggestions other than "do what looks good". There will be times where I use it subtly - like in the first two icon examples - and times when I go more extreme - like with the third icon example. It just depends on how drastically you want to change the colors and how.
With gradients, as you'll see here, I tend to try and "balance" them. I'll meet each Screen layer with a Soft Light or an Overlay. This keeps the colors from getting too washed out or too dark, and the combination of the two makes the colors more bright and saturated. With gradients set to Screen I try not to fill too much space, and I like for it to bring more brightness to where I percieve the major light source to be.
With the Alice icon: she's in the woods and there's a tree trunk to the left, so I put the lighting from the gradient in the opposite corner, sort of reenacting light coming through tree branches. For the Princess and the Frog icon, they're dancing outside while a party is going on inside, the entrace to which is in the bottom right corner - and so that's where I wanted more light to be coming from.
For me, I usually do this after step #2 in the previous column.
These are not the completed icon tutorials. This is just to show the actual coloring that went into them. After what is shown here I went with, from the Carl icon, steps #1 and #2, maybe #5, and finished with #7 and #8.
Icon #1
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a. Color Balance
Cyan/Red -16, Magenta/Green -8, Yellow/Blue -37
b. Set to Screen (layer mask):
c. set to Soft Light:
Icon #2
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a. set to Screen:
b. set to Soft Light:
c. Color Balance
Cyan/Red -2, Magenta/Green -16, Yellow/Blue +12
Icon #3
aka the easiest
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a. Color Balance
Cyan/Red +48, Magenta/Green -100, Yellow/Blue +79
Other icons that utilized Color Balance and/or gradients:
GRADIENT MAPS
You can also use gradient maps (image > adjustments > gradient map) to quickly - and often drastically - change the colors. Gradient maps can be REALLY REALLY AWESOME if you want a quick change to coloring. When I work with gradient maps I put them all on their own layer. This makes it much easier to experiment and change things around. Just to show some of the things you can do, we'll be working with this already made icon, using some of my favorite gradients:
Other icons that utilized Gradient Maps:
AND THAT'S HOW I COLOR DISNEY ICONS
