Welcome to Chrissie's "How-I-do-CGs" Walkthrough. This is NOT the only way you can do CGs, but this is MY personal way and I'm sharing it with you today. I hope that you'll gain something from this, perhaps a technique, or a question that you've been longing to ask has been answered in this tutorial. Er, yeah.
- Photoshop 7.0
- Tablet (**NOTE**: You do NOT need a tablet to do this. The only thing a tablet does is make you do things faster. I will be using a mouse for ALL of this.)
- I would say music but my headphones are currently broken. I've been music-less at my computer for nearly a month now.
- Knowledge on how the pen tool works.
First, we start out with a blank canvas.



Like I do with my other stuff, I usually create a rough sketch of what I want to CG on the screen. Today we'll be CG-ing a... a penguin? Idk, I have no inspiration at the moment. Anyways, take the pen tool and draw it out (in whatever color you like, I always sketch in blue).

Oh, I also google images because Idk what penguins look like, and when you are unsure, looking at references is always good.



Yay... look at my penguin... and it's weirdness, but w/e this is a tutorial, anything will do. Anyways, after the sketch, I usually adjust the transparency.

Then... we use the PEN TOOL.

But first we need to change some of the settings. Go back to your regular brush, and make sure that things look like this:



You may also want to change the foreground color to the color of your lineart. In my case, I use the color brown.

Okay, now that our brush is set, we can click on the pentool. Make sure your settings match mine:



The fun part, we get to use the pen tool! Okay, I like to ZOOM in until I feel like it's at a good view. In here, I only zoomed to 200%.

MAKE A NEW LAYER FOR THE LINEART. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

Click on any point in the canvas where you want to start your line like so.



Then you click on another point on your sketch to make the line. But don't let go of the clicker when you click on the point, you'll want to move your mouse around to adjust the curve so it fits the line. There are also other way to play around with the anchor points but I can't explain them right now.



Continue doing this until you have a line made.

After this, right click >> stroke path. Make sure the tool is BRUSH and the simulate pressure box is UNCHECKED. Then press OK.

After pressing OK, press the ENTER key on your keyboard and the pentool line should go away.



You'll notice that the lines are a bit fuzzy, but that's OK, we'll fix it later. Now, continue lining your sketch using the steps above.

I'd also like to note that you can still deviate from your sketch if you feel like something else would be better. The sketch is merely a guideline so that you know what you are doing!

Eventually, you'll get a picture like this:



Now I delete the sketch layer. The lineart is a bit too fuzzy for my tastes, so I do a little trick to make them sharper and neater. I go to the lineart layer, and click:

FILTER >> SHARPEN >> SHARPEN EDGES

I do this 1-2 times until I get the desired effect. To see the difference, take a look:



This is a matter of preference, however, so you can do whatever you like, really.

Now I make a layer under the lineart and I color in everything using the PENCIL tool, not the BRUSH tool. This is so that it's easier for me to use the magic wand tool later.

Now color in the base colors of your CG.

Tip: What I do is I line the edges of the lineart and once I make an enclosed space, I just use the fill tool to do the rest. This is another reason why I use the PENCIL tool.



Now, temporarily hide the lineart layer, take the magic wand and select the first area that you want to shade. I'm shading the blue part of his body first. Then, unhide the lineart layer but still keep the blue stuff selected.

Make a new layer for your first shade. SHADING LAYER 1

Now we use the BRUSH tool. Pick a color slightly darker than the original color and shade where you feel like shading should go. I can't explain this any better, because I still suck at shading so yeah.

Looks like:



After that, I do the SHARPEN EDGES trick to my shaded area and I adjust the transparency.

Then, I make SHADING LAYER 2 and shade again, this time I use a slightly darker color and I only shade within the shade I used in SHADING LAYER 1.



I make another layer for the shiney spotlight. I use the shape tool and make white circles at the top of the thing where I want shines to be at.

No picture because it's pretty self explanatory.

Then I repeat the steps [ SELECT >> SHADING 1 >> SHADING 2 >> HIGHLIGHTS ] for the next color and so on and so forth until I get something like this:



At this point, I am starting to dislike the lineart coor, so what I do is I go to the lineart layer, click the box that says "LOCK TRANSPARENT PIXELS" (it's in the layer box and you have to hover over the image to get the name of the tool. On mine, it's the first box you click beside the word "Lock:"). Then I freely color over the lines to get colors that I like.



Then I merge the layers together and resize my penguin. Then I make a 1px border around the penguin.

Now, for photoshop, all you have to do is save the thing and it automatically makes the transparent parts of the image transparent. Nifty right?

Finished product:



I hope you found this walkthrough helpful. Please remember, this is not the only way, I'm merely showing you how I do it. You might find certain tricks helpful in your CGing. 8D.

PS: Sorry if anything is vague, creating a walkthrough is hard, and I get lazy. XD;