This tutorial is lifted almost verbatim from my old site. As such, it's probably quite out of date, and you'll have to endure some of my wonderfully vague terminology (and also my disgustingly purple desktop theme). I've put it here on the basis that having any kind of tutorial is probably more useful than having nothing at all.

I've tried to tidy it up a little and insert notes for things that work differently in newer versions of Photoshop or whatever. I've tried to make parts of it clearer, and also removed all those pesky emoticons that were scattered throughout. Hopefully I haven't broken anything by accident...

• Part One: Lines
• Part Two: Base Colours
• Part Three: Shades and Highlights

I'm not really going to touch on drawing techniques and practises in this section, despite how it may appear. If you want me to hold your hand and tell you how to draw, then tough - just go and practise, maybe get some books on the subject you're interested in (How To Draw Manga isn't a bad start if you're interested in the same kinda stuff as me)... maybe at a later date I'll put some more basic stuff in, but this tutorial focuses more on getting your wonderful sketch into some useful form on your computer for colouring it.

Obviously, this tutorial isn't a lot of help if you're planning on sketching and inking directly onto computer using a tablet or somesuch.

I use Photoshop. You can probably do most of this stuff with the GIMP (or Paint Shop Pro, or whatever else), but I'll be giving steps for doing things in Photoshop so you'll have to work it out for yourself if you use something else.

So you've drawn a lovely sketch on a piece of paper, and you want to turn it into a full-blown picture. If you're going for something resembling an anime style, you want nice, clean, black outlines. There are 3 ways (that I can think of at the moment) of doing this:

1. Scan your sketch, draw the outlines on computer.
2. Using pen, draw your outlines straight onto your sketch. Then erase the pencil sketch lines.
3. Scan your sketch. Print it out faintly and coloured (i..e. blue). Ink onto that. Scan and remove the colour, leaving you with the outline.

This little tutorial is going to focus on the third. The second method works, but is prone to blotching... especially if your sketches are as messy and covered in rubbed-out patches as mine. The first method is great, but takes ages... there's also very little to talk about for it, no sophisticated techniques really, just sit there and patiently do it.

If you don't have a printer, this tutorial might not be very useful. So saying, you could still use a lot of the same techniques if you were to, for example, do all of your sketches using blue pencil, and then ink onto those sketches, scan and remove all the blue parts of the picture. I can't promise anything, but it sounds good in theory.

Anyway, here we go!

Scan your sketch (obviously). Since it's only a sketch (and a rough guideline for your inking), you don't need to do it at super high dpi. I did mine at 300dpi, just because that's how I do everything. You can see my scanned example picture nearby, size reduced obviously.

The picture is a bit rough - I hadn't really decided what I was doing with the outfit, and there are some mistakes. Depending on how confident you are, you might want to fix those up on the sketch before you get started on the inking. If you're confident (or lazy like me), you can just try to fix those mistakes on the fly when you start inking.

We need to tinker with the sketch a bit to make it:

1. clear enough to ink onto, but
2. easy to remove once we've printed & inked on top of it

Crop it as much as you can... no point in keeping blank bits of paper around the edges of your picture. Once you've done that, Auto-Levels would be a good idea, in order to fix up the contrast (etc) a bit...

Now. Before you forget, SAVE your sketch. Image quality isn't much of an issue here, you just want to preserve the basic shape and form - so go ahead and use low quality jpegs if you like, they're small so it'll save you some disk space when you've done loads and loads of sketches. PSDs are nice, but when your sketches save at about 3-4 megs each it soon adds up.

I also find that my sketches are sometimes a bit unbalanced. A good way to tell if this is the case (and subsequently fix the problem) is to flip the sketch horizontally. In this case, I'm inking the picture back-to-front to try to help with that a bit. So, if you fancy giving your eyes a chance to see your picture in a new light, flip your picture horizontally.

We need to make this picture into an easy-to-remove colour, so that when we scan the inked version we can remove the sketch lines. I used blue (well, technically cyan), but you can get away with other colours as well... I think. Probably best to stick to cyan for now. Use the Hue/Saturation/Lightness control to colourise your picture.

You need to put the lightness reasonably high to make sure that the sketch is easy to get rid of once you've inked the picture. I tend to find that anywhere over about 70 works quite well, even if it looks quite dark on paper. Try it and see what you find works best, it depends a little on your scanner as well.

Not much to say here really. Make sure that your sketch occupies as much of the paper as you want it to, i.e. if you want to draw a full A4 piece then make sure you're printing the sketch out that big. Scaling it up after you've inked it is ugly and not recommended!

People often ask for hints on how to ink. I'm not really a good person to ask about this, because I never felt all that comfortable with it either, I just practised a lot. If you want to take a similar approach to mine, get yourself some nice, cheap, disposable fineliners or something similar, preferably in a variety of sizes, and start off with the outlines of the shapes. Use a thick pen, and as you move onto finer and finer detail, shift down to thinner and thinner pens.

Don't worry too much about making mistakes. I know it's easier said than done! Just remember that you can always remove little mistakes when you scan the picture in again, so it doesn't matter too much if you mess up a little.

Scanners are good. Use them lots. If you're nervous about goofing up your picture while you ink it, it's perfectly acceptable to scan it at intermediate steps along the way, just to have something to fall back on if you need it.

Once your picture is all inked and scanned, save it again. Use something high quality this time, i.e. a PSD file. Don't worry too much about the size, you can delete it later. It's just nice to keep backups so you have something to go back to.

If you flipped your picture earlier, you might want to flip it back now and see how it looks!

Anyway, this is where the sneakiness begins. With your scanned, inked picture all ready and awaiting your command, look to the bottom right of your Photoshop window - you should currently be inside the Layers tab in the bottom-rightmost palette. Select Channels instead.

Depending on the colour you used, if you select individual channels then you'll notice that certain aspects of your picture become more or less prolific. Selecting red (like in the nearby screenshot), for example, makes the sketchy lines become monochrome and quite dark.

This gives us a pretty good idea that the red channel contains most of the sketchy line data that we want to get rid of, so delete it. Hopefully most of your sketchy lines will be eradicated... but your picture will go a funny colour. Ignore that for now. Delete another channel (I suggest Magenta), and you'll hopefully end up with some nice, clean, black (or grayish, at least) outlines. You'll also be stuck in a slightly odd drawing mode at the moment, so go to Image > Mode in the menu and select Grayscale, otherwise you might get a bit confused/stuck later (which has happened to me more times than I care to mention). Once you've done that, you might like to tweak the levels a bit more (or use Auto-Levels again).

Are we done? Well... nearly.

This is a great time to go in and clean up any little mistakes that might have come to light. Just use the eraser (make sure your background colour is set to white!) and the brush tool (make sure your foreground colour is black!) to fix up any surplus/missing lines. If your picture looks a little smudgy or dirty, you might need to play with the Levels a little more.

Moving the highlighted arrowhead to the left will get rid of any quite-faint smudges or noise that might be present on your picture. The further you move it, the more noise you'll remove, BUT it will also start to make your outlines a little more jagged so be careful not to overdo it.

Optional Step: Streamline

If you have a copy of Adobe Streamline, you can use it here to tidy up your line art even more. If you don't have a copy of Streamline, don't worry - it smooths your lines out somewhat, but it also has a nasty habit of completely mangling any and all the detail in your picture. Might be worth giving a try, but don't expect miracles - for really nice, clean line art, I haven't found anything better than doing it straight onto computer; even Streamline doesn't really compare with that.

Note: Streamline is pretty obsolete now. Adobe Illustrator (CS2 and upwards) has a "Live Trace" function that does the same thing, though

You could use this lineart in its current state for your colouring. By duplicating the layer, setting it's mode to Multiply and colouring addiong layers behind it, you would get some reasonably good results... but there's a nicer way, in my opinion. By changing it from a black and white layer to a black and transparent layer, you can use layer grouping, preserve transparency or other fancy effects to do such things as colourise parts of your line art, easily superimpose your picture over a background and suchlike.

So how do you do it? It's a little fiddly, but NOT difficult. After doing it a few times, you'll hopefully be able to do it without thinking too hard about it (and maybe even with the keyboard shortcuts!)

You're probably still in the Channels tab in the bottom-rightmost palette, which is handy. If not, go to it now. Look at the buttons at the bottom of the palette (also conveniently shown above).

1. Click the one that looks like a ring of dots, i.e. the one on the left of the picture above (and, coincidentally, the leftmost button in the palette too). This selects all the non-zero parts of your lineart - i.e. all the white parts of the picture.
2. Now, go to the Layers tab again, and create a new later. Hit Ctrl+Shift+I (which is the shortcut for Invert Selection), which will select all the black parts of the picture.
3. Change your foreground colour to black, and use the floodfill (or press Alt+Backspace) to fill the selected part of your new layer. This fills in all the areas that should be black with the foreground colour... which is black.
4. Delete the background layer. Deselect everything that you currently have selected, and... you'll have some nice black & transparent line art on it's own layer, all by itself. Now it's simplicity itself to colour your picture by simply adding layers behind this one!

If you want your white background back (and you probably do, because line art looks nicer when it has a non-checkerboard background) then make another new layer, and in the Layer menu (not the layer tab in the bottom right - don't get muddled up) select New > Background From Layer. It'll look the same as it did before, but now it'll be in a more useful state than it was because you can now draw underneath the lines.

And there you go. Hopefully your picture is now in a suitable state for colouring!

This is going to be pretty basic colouring stuff. If you already vaguely know your way around Photoshop, chances are you won't learn much from this.

Continuing from Part One, you should now have some funky lineart all ready to be coloured. I decided that I prefered mine horizontally flipped from how I originally drew it, so I've carried on with it like that. If you fancy trying to follow this tutorial without drawing a picture of your own, I've placed a lower-resolution version of my lines here for people to play with. Since it's a jpeg, you'll still have to do the last step from Part One to turn it from a black-and-white single-layer image to a black-and-transparent multiple-layer image.

This isn't necessarily the best way to apply base colours, but it is probably the easiest, particularly with regard to adjusting colours at a later stage. Using masks may be less memory hungry, particularly when we get to Part Three and start shading things, but I won't cover that stuff here so if you want to know about it then go look it up!

Warning: applying tidy base colours is incredibly boring. Of all the aspects of drawing, it's the one I like the least. In order to overcome the inevitable tedium, there are a couple of things you can do to stop yourself going insane:

1. Zone out and listen to music.
2. Take breaks every so often.

Don't rush and do a half-arsed job. You only have to do it once, and it's important - you'll basically use the base colouring as a template so you don't have to worry about colouring over the lines when it comes to shading later on. If your base colouring is poor, your shading will end up outside the lines and look poor as a consequence.

So... get a drink, stick some music on, and then create a new layer. Make sure the new layer is below your lineart (drag it below if it's not already), but above your background if you have one. Photoshop won't let you put stuff behind the background anyway, so you should be safe.

I chose to start on the skin. I like to start on the rearmost layer and work up, but it'd be fine to work the other way round. Choose a reasonable skin colour as your foreground colour, select the paintbrush tool and choose a reasonably big, solid brush (not one that gets fainter as it gets further from the centre). Now... start colouring! You'll probably want to use a really big brush, so feel free to make a custom brush if you can't find anything that covers an appropriate area.

If you've started on a layer that will eventually be covered by other layers (i.e. if you've started on the skin, as I have, then layers like hair, clothing, etc will probably go in front of it, covering it in places), then you don't need to worry about going over the edges too much. On the picture above, I've got skin colour on some of the hair. It doesn't matter, because the hair colour will be on a higher layer and will cover up that skin.

Keep on colouring away... try to get all the skin coloured, paying careful attention for annoying little gaps between the skin colour and the lineart that can be very easy to miss.

Another warning: Base colouring tends to make your picture look awful, but it'll get better later so just try to accept it for now!

You may notice that I've made the background layer green. This is because it's easier to see where I've gone over the outlines with skin colour, because skin has a high contrast against dark green. It would be harder to see any mistakes I made if I'd left the background white. It's not essential, but you might find it helpful to change the background colour every once in a while if you're having difficulty seeing which parts of the picture you have and have not coloured. It's especially important if your character is wearing white clothes since white doesn't show up well on white!

By tweaking the background colour as you go along, you can make it easier to spot places where you've accidentally coloured over the edges, and also places where your colours don't quite reach all the way to the line.

Bored yet? Make another new layer or two, and use that to colour something other than skin, i.e. some of the clothing or straps.

Note that when you draw or erase, it only effects the currently selected layer - if you want to erase a section of skin, you'll need to have the skin layer selected.

Don't get hung up on the colours at this stage, they're easy to change later on and it's nice to experiment as you go along. You can fiddle with the colours to break up the dull, dull base colouring process.

Here are some Photoshop keyboard shortcuts you're bound to fall in love with:

• Press B to select paintbrush
• Press E to select eraser
• Press I to select the colour picker
• Hold SPACE to scroll around your picture

They save a lot of clicking on tools from the tool panel, which in turn saves a lot of time. Use them and abuse them. Even if you're working with a tablet, it is quicker (for me) to use E and B to switch between Eraser and Brush than it is to turn the pen around and use the other end.

You may be spotting a trend with the names of these steps. Just keep plugging away, and hopefully as you build up more levels of colour the picture will start to look a bit less messy than it did earlier. If you're starting to get worried about your picture looking crap, you might find it helpful to colour the eyes... for some reason it makes a big difference, to my brain at least.

If you started on one of the foremost layers and are working your way back, base colouring gets more and more fun as you go along, because you can go over the edges more and more and your mistakes are covered by higher layers.

I do it the other way round, so base colouring gets more and more annoying as I go along. I also tend to leave the hair until last. Guess what my favourite part of the picture isn't.

Chances are that at some point you'll end up placing colours on the wrong layer, and won't realise it until it's too late. There's not really any easy way to rectify this, and it happens to the best of us (even after doing this stuff for years), so don't get too disheartened when it eventually happens to you. If you're lucky then you can fix it with some copy and paste magic, and if you're really unlucky then you'll need to delete a layer or revert to an old copy of the picture. You have been saving regularly, right?

Eventually you'll have flat colours for every surface in the picture. Finally you'll be finished with this horrible phase and ready to get onto some more fun parts of colouring.

No matter how good a job you've done, your picture is likely to look pretty uninspiring by this stage. Still, just console yourself with the thought that it will soon get better!

You can use the Hue/Saturation/Luminance tool (shortcut: Control+U) to adjust the colours on your picture. If you've been well-behaved and kept each of your surface colours on a separate layer, you should be able to tweak each colour individually. This can help to make it look a little better, at least.

Rest assured, this is a lot more entertaining than the stuff in Part Two was.

I'm assuming you're following on and have some kind of base coloured picture from the end of Part Two. I'm not putting a handy base coloured version up here, partly because it would be pretty big, so I guess you'll be a bit stuck if you didn't follow the previous sections.

This tutorial focuses on cel-style shading - that is to say, there are no gradients and soft transitions between areas of shade and areas of light, the boundaries are just jumps from one colour to another. Cel-style shading can look very cool if you get it right. Just think about where the light is coming from and where the shadow would subsequently be (i.e. where there's no light!) and you hopefully won't have too many problems.

We're going to apply shading using Groups. You can achieve a similar effect using the Preserve Transparency option (or layer masks, or selecting layer transparency, or whatever), but it gets fiddly if you want any more than 2 tones of shading per area of colour, so it's not recommended unless you have an old version of Photoshop that doesn't allow grouping.

Let's start by shading the skin. Make a new layer above the skin layer, but below whatever the layer above the skin was. Give this some helpful name that indicates it's the first level of shading for the skin.

Now hit Control+G (there's also a Group option in one of the menus, but I can't remember where) to group the layer with the skin layer, so that your layer pane looks something like the picture on the right - the skin shading layer (the highlighted layer in the example screenshot) should be immediately above the base skin layer and inset a little, and have a little arrow next to it that points down to the base skin layer.

Note: At some point (I think it was Photoshop CS), Adobe decided to faff about and change the naming scheme for this stuff. Subsequently, if you're using a newer version of Photoshop, Grouping layers refers to something else entirely and it ISN'T what you want. Instead, you want to create a Clipping Mask for the shading, which is done in the same way as I have described for grouping layers up until the "hit Control+G" part. At this point, you want to hold down the Alt key and hover the mouse over the joining line between the two layers (the base skin layer and the skin shading layer). The mouse pointer should change to a little figure-of-eight shaped thing (with a black-filled circle and a dithered circle beneath it), and if you click then the layers will be linked. Thereafter, the layers will behave pretty much the same as the old Grouped layers did, just with a different name. It took me ages to discover this; I thought they'd just removed the functionality entirely.

Use the colour picker to get your skin colour, and then pick a darker skin shade to use as the first level of shading. Get a fairly large brush, and draw onto an area of skin to apply shading. If you make a mistake, simply use the eraser. The clever part comes when you draw somewhere over the edge of the skin, because the shading doesn't go over the edges even if you tell it to. That's what all that confusing grouping stuff is about - it stops you drawing onto any area that isn't covered by the layer which it's grouped to.

Keep shading away. Once you've finished one layer, move onto the next and repeat. A word of warning - groups can be a little memory hungry in Photoshop, so you may need to drop the resolution of your image, try to use less layers if possible... or buy some more memory! Alternatively, you can trying to use something other than groups, but again, I'm not going to cover that stuff here.

Eventually you'll have applied a single layer of shading to all of the base colour layers in your picture, similar to the example shown to the left. It doesn't take that long, yet it looks massively better than the flat colours we had at the end of Part Two, doesn't it? Stick around, because it gets better yet.

The picture at the end of the previous section probably seems pretty good, and if you're really pushed for time/memory/effort then it might even suffice as a finished piece (well, maybe with some minor additions). Since we're interested in getting this picture looking really sweet, however, let's keep on going.

Go back to the skin layer, and create another new layer above the first layer of shading. Group it with the skin by hitting Ctrl+G. This will be a second level of shading. Use the colour picker to get your skin shade colour, and pick a darker skin tone for the second layer of shading. Carefully draw onto the parts of the picture that you feel should be really dark. Check out the example nearby if you want an example of what I mean.

Even by just adding the extra shading to the skin in relatively few places, it can have a huge impact and make the picture look more three dimensional. If you have the patience, give every layer a second tone of shading, effectively giving you a 3-tone shaded picture (since every surface has a base tone plus two tones of shadow).

Go back to your skin layer yet again. Below the first layer of shading but above the base skin layer, create yet another layer. This one will be grouped with the skin automatically, so you don't need to hit Ctrl+G (hopefully it won't hurt if you do, but be careful you don't accidentally end up un-grouping everything!)

Use the colour picker to get your base skin colour. Select an even paler skin shade than that, and draw onto the picture where the skin would be closest to the light source. You're applying highlights.

Once again, although it takes very little time at all it can have a huge impact. Highlighting the whole picture with some effort will make the whole thing look even more impressive than it did before. To the right is what I ended up with, having done the whole picture (except the hair and eyes, since they're special and more details follow) in 4-tone colour.

You've probably noticed that all this shading and highlighting is pretty similar. Since it's not terribly hard in the first place, and since repetition is supposed to be a good way to remember how to do something, chances are that you should be starting to get the hang of it by now.

Anyway, hopefully now it's starting to look more like a decent picture!

There are no hard and fast rules for the eyes, but generally the more attention you pay to them the better they look. Since the eyes are a focal point of the picture, you'll want to dedicate a little time to them... which is why I've dedicated a whole section to them, in fact.

Take a look at the eyes I ended up with. Color Burn and Dodge layers can be effective for quickly and easily giving depth to the iris, but just using a similar approach to all of the other shading and highlighting described above should work adequately too. Most (anime) eyes fade to black toward the top, and the extra swirls and lighting on the eyelids are just an extra layer above the outline onto which I just drew with the paintbrush and smudged a bit. Just experiment a bit, since having a unique style for your eyes is a good thing.

Shading the eye whites has a huge effect, surprisingly, so don't forget those!

Argh, hair! The problem with drawing cute anime girls is that they often have long hair, and hair can be a real pain in the behind. At the end of the day, you get out what you put in - if you dedicate a lot of time to the hair, it will look cool. It is possible to do it very quickly and have it look fairly reasonable, but nothing can compare to hair that's had a lot of time spent on it.

A technique I often use for hair is to give it a couple of layers of shading, as I would anything else, then give it the typical anime spiky band of highlighting and fiddle about with that highlighting a bit...

Having shaded the hair (using the same normal "boring" shading methods as for everything else, described above), get yourself a white brush and roughly draw on some spikes of light to give the impression of a sheen.

It looks okayish, but the spikes tend to have quite soft ends if you draw them with the paintbrush. Go in there with the eraser and sharpen them up a bit. Also, adding extra lines of light on the edges of the hair toward the light source can make the picture look a bit better.

Notice that the spikes are now much sharper and that I added some extra light lines on the right edges of the hair. Anime hair is allowed to look kinda boxy and solid; it's just part of the style.

Now... if you're feeling really fancy, take the highlight layer and duplicate it. With the bottom layer of highlights selected, use a Gaussian Blur filter (at somewhere between 2 and 5 pixels usually). Try playing around with the layer options, soft light and hard light can work very nicely for the hair highlights. Also, using the Hue/Saturation/Lightness control to colourise the highlights (i.e. convert them from white to bright yellow in the example girl's hair) can make it look quite funky too.

Just playing around and finding effects by accident is an essential part of colouring, unfortunately, and once again proves that the old saying "practice makes perfect" is kinda true (and also makes writing a tutorial seem like a bit of a fruitless process). The more you practise, the more interesting, fun, and downright cool-looking techniques you can acquire.

The picture probably isn't quite finished; it could really use a background (though if you want to add a background, you should plan for it a lot earlier - adding one haphazardly at the end just tends to look bad), and there's no signature on it. So saying, hopefully the main character looks good at least, and I don't think a tutorial on adding a signature should really be necessary.

Hopefully your picture has turned out looking reasonably decent, and even if that somehow didn't happen, hopefully you learned a thing or two from this tutorial.