New manga colouring skills

James Ghio breaks down his rendering techniques for creating colourful and appealing manga art without having to render every element

James Ghio breaks down his rendering method for creating colourful manga art.

In this workshop, I’ll explain the basic rendering techniques that artists can use to effectively manage their illustration process.

There’s a primary directional light in my painting that helps show off forms with a strong degree of clarity. I’ll be explaining the significance of this lighting scheme and how to render out the lights and darks within a set tonal range. Note that I’ll be keeping all the tones within this tonal range until I’m satisfied with their overall forms. After establishing a strong black and white base, I’ll apply colour through the use of Color adjustment layers.

As you decide on your tonal range, think of it as 0 being white and 100 being black. When working in black and white, it’s best to keep the tonal range close and maintain the values within 30 units of each other. This means that when rendering, your lightest tone should be only 30 units brighter than your darkest tone.

Once you’ve finished this tonally controlled rendering, you can add tones outside of this range to enhance your core shadows, drop shadows and occlusions in the dark areas, as well as any highlights or speculars in the light areas.

I’ll also discuss colour choices and how these decisions reduce the time taken to finish the image. Finally, cover and box art require some design flair in placing elements to strengthen the composition, and so I’ll reveal how you can achieve this.