by Abominae » Wed Apr 08, 2009 8:31 pm
I'll share a technique with you (no, not foi or res) that I used when doing sprite conversions with MS paint (yes, it very well should work with any program)
Cut off a rectangular section of the screen. In fullscreen mode, it should be roughly half the length of your palette. Now, seperate the rectangle into 5 smaller sections going across and numerous other sections going from the top to the bottom of the rectangles.
What you have should look like this:
__________________
__|__|__|__|__|__|__| - Light shade 1
__|__|__|__|__|__|__| - Light shade 2
__|__|__|__|__|__|__| - Default color
__|__|__|__|__|__|__| - Dark shade 2
__|__|__|__|__|__|__| - Dark shade 1
Now, in each third square, going top to bottom. you place a default color of your choosing. Red, Green, Blue, Yellow are excellent starting points, but you will need more than that for anime coloring. Try adding Orange, Violet, Cyan, and two skin tones to the list.
Now, Above, you take the default color and paste shade in two lighter versions of each color and, likewise, two darker shades for the corrisponding color.
You will also need a gray scale for this too. 5 colors (white, light gray, gray, dark gray, and black are what you use for gray scale)
Now, all you are left to do is gather all the rest of the colors you need, find their lighting and shading counterparts and fill in normally. It makes coloring WAY easier on the whole and you can even save your color palette for future use.
For less complicated coloring schemes, cut it down to 3 variations of your chosen colors. you need not delete any information, just cut down from say "1-2-3-4-5" to perhaps "1-3-5" or "2-3-4". Whatever you decide will be best for your needs. And ALWAYS KEEP A FOLDER WITH YOUR UNCOLORED PICTURES AS BACK-UP!!!!!!!! NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER SAVE OVER ANY OF THEM!!!!!!!
Something I forgot to mention, you should use a dark, almost black, orange color for the border of your palette. An orange that dark is something you'll likely never use.
You can also expand your palette as you see fit, but should never throw away any of the colors you add to it.
Also, only the gray scale should have white and black (not to mention that the other shades should not be so light/dark as to almost be either color)