How to color lines in colored line art...huh?

I've gotten a few questions on how to color the blank ink lines in a drawing to create a softer more "painterly" look. So, here is my first attempt at a tutorial. By all means this probably isn't the best way to do this but I haven't really seen any other tutorials tackling this technique.

1. First scan in your inked drawing at 300 dpi RGB (or CYMK if it's for print)

• desaturate
• adjust levels so that you a dealing with a file made of only black or white pixels. I usually do this by moving the sliders towards the middle a bit, then clicking ok. After a few times, you'll be able to move the sliders all the way to the middle creating a BMP-like file without destroying your ink work

Your ink layer should look like this when zoomed in:




If your inked layer is the background, be sure to double-click on it to unlock it and change the layer mode to "Multiply". This will make it possible to paint "underneath" the inked lines like in the good ol' days of cutting ruby.



Here's a screen shot of the coloring-in progress:



Once all your coloring is done, it's time to color those black lines. This is the part of the process that you should take with a grain of salt. There might (and probably is) be a better way of doing this, but this works for now.

This might be a good time to "Save as..." because the next steps are a bit permanent.

Select all of your layers of color and merge them so you only have a layer of your inks and a layer of your color.



Now use the magic wand (with contiguous NOT selected) and click on a black area of your inks, while on the ink layer. It should look something like this:



Now go to your "colors" layer and hit delete.



Next, go back to your inks layer and choose your paintbrush. Select "lighten" mode from the drop-down box for your paintbrush. Your paintbrush will now only lighten a color to the color you have selected in your swatch.



Before you do this it might be a good idea to create a duplicate layer of your inks (ironically, in this case I haven't) in case you mess up. Say you "lighten some black lines to yellow. Well, you can't necessarily "lighten" them to let's say, a dark blue. The only way to do that is to mess with levels, hue/saturation, contrast, etc.



So there you go. Like I said, this is not the best way but it works. Please let me know what you guys think. Questions, suggestions, I'd love to hear!


Here's the finish:



And a few more created with this technique: