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3. Coloring

The coloring technique is pretty much the same I’ve used with Flash.
Here’s a quick walkthrough:

On a new layer below the line art layer, I laid down my base colors:

On the next new layer, I started to draw some paths for the skin shading.

I can do this on one single layer in Illustrator, while I’d need one layer for every shade value in Flash. Notice that I gave every value another stroke color. This is important if you work on one layer because a) if you don’t assign different colors you’ll get confused with what shade needs which value and b) selecting those paths is way easier this way later on.

I used 5 different values for coloring. Selecting on of the pink-colored paths (because it’s going to be the darkest value) I started coloring. To select the rest of the pink-colored parths I simply had to go to Select – Same – Stroke Color and this way selected every pink stroke on this layer.

I set the Stroke color to “none” in the tool box and assigned a darker value of the skin color as the fill color. Without deselecting the shapes I went over to the Transparency window (Shift+F10 if you can’t see it) to change the blending mode from normal to multiply and to reduce the opacity to 25%.

Then I continued the same steps for all the other shapes and gave them different opacities ranging from 25% (for the darkest value) to 5% (for the lightest value):

This is the final outcome. If the shading would turn out too dark, I’d select everything, group it and again reduce the opacity till I’m satisfied with the outcome.

I then went over to the top and first made strokes with 4 different colors:

and colored them later again set to multiply and an opacity ranging from 20% - 5%

The Jeans only got 2 differently colored shapes:

Because I didn’t want to let the jeans become too detailed, since the rest of this piece was not that detailed either and the pants would become a bit to dominant otherwise. As you can see, I also changes its base color to a slightly darker value, because I wasn’t feeling the first one. Coloring went the same way as the rest. Shapes set to multiply and opacities of 30% and 20%.

With the finished coloring I wasn’t feeling the whole setup anymore. In my opinion, the boy was too close to the female torso, so I selected it and moved it more to the right:

Due to this moving, the boy goes a little bit over the actual artboard. Illustrator handles this different than Flash does. In Flash, if something is outside of the main stage, it won’t be visible when you publish the piece, be it an animation (and animations are the reason why things outside of the main stage won’t show up) or a simple image. When you publish something with Illustrator which has parts of the final image outside of the art board, those parts will still be visible, so you have to crop the image later on.

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