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In this tutorial, I'll be coloring an image of Evil Yori that I drew at Otakon 2005, and inked with a brush pen. Note that I inked it pretty darn fast, and there's a lot if inking mistakes, as well as some ink splatters. Some of the sporadic line work I've decided to leave as is because I like the look of random crazy lines in places where they aren't supposed to be.

I scanned the image at 240 dpi. I usually scan at either 240 or 300 dpi. 300 is best if you're planning on printing your work. In fact, you should probably always scan images at 300 dpi. Only an idiot would scan at 240! Well, in truth the difference between the two when printed is pretty miniscule, and scanning at 240 does result in a smaller file size that's a little easier to work with, or so I’ve experienced.

Gods, look at that disgusting line work! Ok, I guess it's not that bad, but it's still worth cleaning up. Select your brush tool and white out any imperfections and unmentionables.

What I'm attempting to accomplish when I clean up my linework is to make it as black and white as possible. Although, since I plan on using Adobe Streamline to vecotrize my lines and convert the image completely to black and white, what I'm doing now is try to remove the gray areas, or black flakes that Streamline might convert.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, that's ok, just work on removing all those little black dots and added marks that you're not going to want to see in the final image.

Hopefully you now have something you're happy with coloring.You'll notice the difference is pretty minor between this version and the one above, but this is a VERY LARGE image shrunk down. If you look, you'll notice it's significantly cleaner than the version pictures above. It's possible to spend an hour or more just cleaning your line art. I knew some techniques that I covered in the scanning section of this tutorial, so it only took me about 15 minutes.

Now save your file with a .psd extension. I named mine evil_yori.psd .