Now it's time to start filling in the color on our existing line art.
We're going to start doing that while keeping our outlines
for reference so we don't lose any information while we're going forward.
As you can see here, I have a lot of different colors to fill in from my design.
I'm going to start just by doing the main body piece,
but keeping the outlines as reference because I will have to fill in
all of the different layers for her clothes etc.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this,
and as you can see I've just animated these on separate layers,
which is partially just so that I could keep them separate,
but also because it helps me later with cleaning up this part.
I'm going to duplicate my main outline layer,
which is this guy.
I'm just going to use this layer to just fill in with a color drops so it's really easy.
I'm going to start with the skin color because that's the base layer of all of this.
Then what I'm actually going to do is go in and erase some of these inner lines
that would stop the color fill from doing its job over the full thing,
and then drop it in and see how that looks.
That basically covers my whole frame.
I have a little bit of a gap right here.
You can check your edges, sometimes it gets
a little junkie when you're filling with the color fill.
But this looks pretty good to me.
I'm going to just keep going.
I've kept my outline layer,
and I'm actually going to set this to multiply,
and put it to a lower opacity.
I have it for reference later,
but I'm not going to do all of the details of the clothing right now.
Now I'm just going to continue filling in
all of my layers that I need to match my design,
and adding all of the inlines,
outlines if there are any,
different color details, shadows, etc.
Everything that was in my design,
I'm going to start layering into here.
It's your way, it's like the most mindless part of this whole process, I think so.
Just enjoy it. It's pretty cool to start
seeing the animation come together a little more.
What I'm using is the color drop,
which is basically where you just tap on the color in the upper right corner,
and just drag it to whatever you want to fill.
Sometimes, it'll fill too much,
and that's when you can start using the threshold.
If you just hold it over the area,
you'll see this pop up.
If it's too much,
then you can just drag it back until it starts respecting your outline.
That's super helpful for filling in.
It makes it way faster than just trying to use
your guesswork and messing with threshold on your own.
While you're doing this process,
sometimes you'll find that even your clean up line art was a little bit messy.
At this part, you can go in and clean that up a little bit.
I don't hate it,
I don't think that the messiness is too bad just because especially for me,
I like having the texture,
and the handmade feel of it.
That's part of why I use these brushes that have little texture on the edge,
because it feels to me like a little more tactile and a little more personal.
One thing to look out for also that I'm doing here is any gaps in
lines when you're getting a little messy which I tend to do.
Just closing those up so that when you do your color
fill it doesn't end up going everywhere,
and then not working for you.
We're going to jump ahead to where I've already filled in
all of my layers with their own solid colors.
I'm going to start going into the details of adding
her clothing and some of the stuff that is going to be
layered on top of our base layers that we've already filled.
This is why I kept my outline layer because otherwise I would be totally lost.
I'm going to go in and start adding her clothes on a clipping mask
since they follow her contours pretty fully.
I'm just going to start doing it as an outline here,
just like I did everything else.
I'm going to just do this pretty cleanly because we're no longer in our rough animation.
This is pretty much what it's going to look like,
the same as the outlines.
This part is really great because it feels very meditative,
and simple, and easy.
But it is the stage where you start to
see your entire design and it looks almost finished,
and you're like, "Holy crap.
This is like a real thing that exists.
It's moving, this is crazy."
It's one of my favorite parts because it also just feels really fun to do.
It's not something that makes your brain hurt too much like some of the earlier stages.
I like it. One of the things that you might have to do while doing
this part is some small adjustments where
your outlines may be a little messier or maybe where,
once they're filled in, you see them as a full shape rather than just lines,
and you'll see where they need to be adjusted a little bit.
Just remember to check back and forth between
each frame to make sure that it still looks okay.
I like to draw the outline around the whole piece just so that I can color drop it
instead of trying to fill it in all by hand because that would take forever.
Sometimes they get lazy and go outside the contour,
and then I have things like this where I can't figure out whether I've
missed a line or whether my threshold is too high.
Depending on how much effort you want to put in to save yourself that headache,
you can just follow the contour of your thing but just not too intensely.
This part I'm going to go around her arm here because I don't want to add
another layer on top of the arm when I already have her skin tone here.
I'm just going to go around where I've drawn her arm contour.
Then if it'll look strange once is filled in,
I can just go back and adjust, it's not a big deal.
I also like using layers for this because it
mirrors how you would design this in the first place.
I would at least make a base layer and then start adding layers on
top so that I can change the color and everything as I go.
I find it helpful for my brain to just keep everything really distinct,
so I don't get confused about my layers.
You'll notice that I'm only doing the base layer of
her entire jumpsuit rather than including the blue line of her belt.
That's because I'm gong to do another pass on top of
this with that as a separate layer just to get this space laden first,
so I don't have to worry about matching too much to each frame animation-wise right now.
Now that I've filled in a little bit more of my detail layers,
I'm going to go in and double check now that there are fulfilled shape,
and see what the overall impression is,
and whether I need to clean anything up or
make anything a little more continue or shape-wise.
As I'm going, the pant length looks pretty decent,
but I do notice that the V on her chest is popping around a little bit.
This part goes straight to a side view,
and this isn't too different from this angle-wise.
I'm just going to move this V over compared to what it was in the design here,
and just make it more cohesive between those two frames.
Now, we've made that look a little closer to a profile view.
Having this bridge between the pure profile,
and our more three-quarter view is going to help a lot.
Yes. That already looks a lot more of a natural turn.
I think I'm going to add a little bit here to make now
the transition between this frame and this frame a little cleaner.
Now that I've gone in and started to fill in all of the details,
I'm going to continue to do that through all of the layers on top
of each other that I normally would in a regular design.
I'm going to go in, and as you can see,
I've already added some of these blue stripes at the bottom of her legs,
and some of the inlines that we has separating her two legs.
I'm going to go ahead and start doing that to the sleeves right here,
and adding the inline there since this is just still from my sketch layer here.
I'm going to start at the beginning again,
and just go through,
and start tracing over my lines,
but cleaner and with my actual color that I want to use.
Now that I go through one of my finished frames,
you can see that I have my coat detail,
I have my hair, I have my jumpsuit,
which I've actually, once I went through and I smoothed all of these out,
I just flattened them to save on layer space because I was having 20 layers per frame,
and that was a little too much for my Procreate file size.
I've also added the face.
For the face, I've just duplicated it and dragged it for most of
this because I've decided I don't actually want too much head turn on her.
I've added the back layer of hair which just follows the same movement as the front,
but I have just added it behind her,
which is another reason why breaking everything out in layers is so helpful.
I've added her back, and I've actually added a little bit of a shadow on her back.
I decided, compared to the design that I didn't really want this super dark color here.
I have just gone ahead and done a lighter shadow instead.
That's something that is totally fine.
You can see how is very,
just a little bit naturally from my transition, from my design.
But I'm pretty happy with it and I've actually changed
these colors because I wanted a little more contrast.
Now that we've gone over how to do this a little bit,
you can start going into your own animation,
adding all of the layers that you want to the level of detail that you want,
and then we're going to start going into the very final touches.