You’re totally right that there are a lot of tutorials that get lengthy and complicated and, I think, practically useless. Unfortunately, there are also lot of books on Photoshop (and Illustrator) like that as well. If you’re looking for books or anything, there is an author named Deke McClelland who writes about all the Adobe stuff, who I’d recommend before any others. It’s pretty in-depth so it can overwhelm, but he keeps things fairly straightforward and simple.

For me, I prefer to stick with the black and white Outlines set to Multiply. Using the Multiply mode on color layers isn’t something I feel like I have a lot of control over. What that Multiply mode is going to do is actually multiply your color value with what’s underneath it. I’m not sure what the number system is that they use, but essentially white multiplies no value (zero) to the layer underneath, so that’s why it appears to drop out when placed over another color. Black multiplies the maximum value so no matter what you put under it, it’ll always remain black. Every other color though, is going to darken whenever another layer is underneath it, so if you work with a lot of layers (which I do), it’ll cause a lot of problems.

PS: the “All Layers” checkbox thingy is exactly what I was desperately trying to figure out. I had no idea how to paste the color into a different layer. Thanks a lot for that!

Mark,I know what you mean about leaving gaps in your artwork. I’ve got them everywhere and I’m kind of stubborn about letting the tools (Photoshop) dictate how I draw so I’m resigned to going in a cleaning my work up before using the Paint Bucket. It’s pretty quick, though. Maybe I’ll talk about that next time.

Paul, Greg, I share your pain. I used to do this using the Magic Wand Tool and expanding it. It took forever.:(

Kmykris, that’s a great suggestion. I tried upping the tolerance and it works nicely, and will actually expand your color area pretty well by clicking a couple extra times. I’ll usually fill in the gaps in my artwork with whatever color I’m filling that area, though, in so using the tolerance for me may cause problems.

Danny, that’s an interesting tutorial. I read through it real quick, but will have to go back and read through it again more carefully. It could be really sweet though.

Mark,switching anti-alias off with the Paint Bucket tool actually makes things worse because it’s the color layer that’ll have the jagged edges. On the other hand, if you scan in your linework as straight black and white (no grays), you shouldn’t have this problem at all. The downside is that non-anti-aliased (is that a double negative?) lines will look jagged and not so hot.

Thanks again, everyone.

You just need two plugins from BPelt, ‘multifill’ and ‘flatten’ (they’re free, just Google “BPelt plugins”.) You have to enclose any open line work like in your method, but you can also use that step to pre-lay shadow and highlight areas to save even more time. You only have use the paint bucket to choose your final colors and shadow/highlight shades/tones.

The best part is, you can keep everything on a single “COLOR” layer to save time and computer memory usage. I haven’t used this in practice as I’ve been forcing myself to use The GIMP the last several months (long story), but the tests I’ve done seem to prove that this saves a LOT of time and I’ve been considering switching back to Photoshop for this method alone.