ususmomo

Thank you! Honestly, coloring isn’t my strong point, so I’m really happy you complimented it! 🥺💓

I haven’t studied art formally, and my coloring style is mostly intuitive, but I’ll try to explain my process clearly!

Recently, I started making a color sketch before starting the main coloring. It’s a simple but important step. Don’t choose colors randomly, and sometimes switch to grayscale to check overall brightness and balance. My coloring style doesn’t involve layering colors for depth, so planning colors beforehand is especially important for me.

I’ll explain using my most recent drawing—the Kuma family driving!

In that illustration, I first chose pink, blue, and yellow as my main colors. When picking these, it’s good to choose colors that form a triangle on the color wheel. You can learn more about this from books on color theory. Usually, I pick about three colors, but two or four colors also work. Having a color palette reference book is very helpful!

Next, I roughly applied the colors I’d chosen. At this stage, it’s really rough 🤣🤣 For example, blue for the sky, yellow for the car, and pink for the characters’ skin and hair. So, my main colors became pink and blue, with yellow as an accent.

After that, I made a rough color sketch. Here, I try to stick closely to the original three colors and avoid choosing colors from very different hues. This time, I wanted to express a summery sky and atmosphere, so the background is bright, and I made the characters darker for contrast. Additionally, I imagined backlighting, so I added highlights with colors close to white. Because the car was yellow, I used warm colors for the rim light. If the car had been blue, I’d have chosen cooler colors. Rim lights look nice when they’re slightly brighter and more saturated than your base colors.

Personally, I think you don’t need to strictly follow the light source. Sometimes I even add fake highlights if I think they look good! However, too many fake highlights can look unnatural, so it’s important to keep them moderate and still keep the main light source in mind.

I used the color sketch as a reference to paint the base colors. (Sorry, the background was already merged at this stage, so I can’t show that separately!)

After painting, the character colors looked a little too pale, so I adjusted them with tone curves. Higher contrast gives a stronger summer feel!

Next, I painted details according to the color sketch. My style is mostly anime-style coloring, so I use a hard brush primarily, but I occasionally soften some areas like skin.

First, I added highlights and rim lights.

When viewed in grayscale, Ginny and Bonney’s faces were blending into Kuma’s body. To help their faces stand out, I added brighter colors around their faces. In situations like this, I often use layer modes like “Soft Light” and “Color Dodge,” but feel free to choose your favorites!

Next, I added shadows and further emphasized bright areas for balance.

Now, onto finishing touches!

I mainly use

Screen (for adding gentle overall lighting)

Soft Light (for slight brightness or color adjustments)

Overlay (I didn’t use this time, but it’s great for increasing saturation)

For example, I used the Screen layer mode to add some yellow-green lighting on the right side, to represent sunlight.

With Soft Light, I adjusted areas where characters overlap. I added pink around the hair and a yellowish tone around the skin to clearly separate the characters when viewed in grayscale.

But honestly, I often overdo this step, making the picture feel vague or fuzzy. Looking at this again… yeah… there’s room for improvement. Anyway, don’t overdo it! 🥺🥺

Finally, I slightly adjusted the overall color (lowered saturation because it felt a bit noisy), added a gentle glow effect, applied some noise, and sharpened it a bit—and it’s done!

Explaining this was a good way for me to reorganize my own coloring process! Thanks for asking! I’m not sure how helpful this explanation was, but I hope you have fun drawing too! ✨ I’ll try to record a timelapse video of my drawing process next time. But my computer slows down a lot when I record, so it might be tricky 🤣