Luna from Sailor Moon

A Coloring tutorial for people who use Photoshop, and wish to know more things about it. Forgive my rambles through out this tutorial. This is also kinda a progress of the drawing that I did of Luna. from Sailor Moon. I hope you all enjoy it and the enjoy the finished product. 

For the method used in this tutorial it is best to have: A good tablet with working pressure sensitivity, A fair amount of patience, airbrush type brushes, and  if you don't get it right, like right away don't be hard on yourself! Everything takes practice.

I started this drawing by sketching and linearting it in Paint Tool Sai. Majority of it has black lines and little bits of it obviously is linearted with pinks and dark orange. I don't normally color my pictures in Pant Tool Sai, I prefer Photoshop. However in the near future I'll do a coloring tutorial for those who usePaint Tool Sai. :3 Majority of people I know have Paint Tool Sai.

First thing I do in Photoshop, it flat color the picture. I don't always color it all like it is shown, normally I work on one part at a time and flat color as I go. This is completely flat colored just to show everyone the color scheme. The first thing I go for to color is the background, but I have decided to keep it white so I can alter this picture for future projects. Next thing I color after the background is the skin.

When coloring the skin I start with the shading first, it helps me determine the light source, even though I suck major rotten eggs when it comes to light sources.

After blending the shading on the skin and using the flat color of the skin tone as a reflective color to make things appear more "3-Diemenstial" Lol I hope I spelled that right. Anyways. I add lighter tones on the skin. Like what is pictured here.

I then blend in the lighter tones, like is pictured here. :3

Next is the hair. Hair can be tricky, but all you gotta do is go with the flow of the hair, when it curls up and down or how it draps over a body part or anything else. Hair is kinda lifeless so it's up to the artist to make it appear full of life and so on so forth. Hair can add a lot to the mood of a picture. Don't be afraid to create a new layer above you hair layer to work with the shading of the hair. I tend to start off roughly and then go back in and blend it around

What it looks like when I have it blended. The flat color is playing as a highlight right now, buuuutttt lets add more highlight to make the lightened part pop more.

Using a smaller brush than what I used for the hair, lightly stroke the lighter color over the color that was used as a flat color. See how it looks so much more shiny? Yeah lets keep adding more highlights mmkay?

Finished with the highlights, how it looks so wavy and lively makes me smile, I hope it makes you smile too. C:
Depending on the hair color, you can use white or something relatively close to white to make the highlights pop even more, by applying it on top of the highlight color. Though since Luna's hair is black, that method would probably over do the look. In general with black hair, that method would probably over do it in my opinion. Anyways!

Onto the yellow part of the dress and the yellow ribbon.

Yellow is kinda easy to screw up in my opinion especially if yer shading-blending it, instead of cell shading. (like cartoonized shading.) Like it is easy to make yellow look like puke yellow instead of a normal pretty yellow. Just a personal opinion so I shade yellow a certain way, easy to do though. very easy to do. Like is pictured here, I flat colored her dress with a soft yellow and then roughly shaded it with a bright gold-ish yellow. Luna's dress is just straight up gold-ish yellow but I think this method does pretty good. It adds warmth and a gold tone to the the yellow flat color. Once applied the gold-ish yellow, blend it of course and then move on the the actual shading color.

The shading color. Which is kinda burnt orange looking color isn't it? Well once that color is blended it'll look nice trust me on that.

All blended? Now don't forget to add a little bit of the brighter gold yellow in the darker burnt orange spots, add it lightly and blend it in without disturbing the initial shading. This is to help make things look more "3-diemensial" Once again I am not sure if I spelled that right. Moving on.

Now the next part is the.. black lace puff balls on her dress that are located on top of her breasts, that I like to call... The boob flowers. They are actually just black lace puff balls for decoration but I drew them like they were carnations because it made sense to so I call them boob flowers. Next thing to do is is the set the boob flower layer to "Multiply" like shown. This will show the colors underneath the grey.

Next lower the layer's opacity down to 85%. It's still dark but not over whelming and the colors underneath show much more putting the whole sheerness into effect.

Next take an airbrush type photoshop brush, (Doesn't have to be an airbrush but something that is soft around the edges.) and draw around the petals like so. See what it does? Looks nice eh? Anyways. It creates more of a thickness to the sheer fabric so it's not so.. flat looking.

Now once finished with that, create a layer above the lineart layer and name it sparklys or sparkles, whichever you want. We are gonna add some pretty glitz to Luna's dress. C:

The brushes that I'll be using for the sparkles is the hard round brush on figure A, and the on on figure B. These brushes are standard to photoshop, they come with it. Everyone should have these brushes. If not then I am not sure if I can help you there.

Now with those brushes dot them around the boob flowers while on the layer created for sparkles. Be careful not to over do, it would look not so pretty if it was over done. Next!

Now moving on the the larger part of the dress. The black sheer sparkly part of her dress. I think this was more time consuming than her hair was for me. Oh well though it kept me occupied. Since there are two layers of the the black sheerness of her dress I felt that it was best to keep the top layer and the bottom layer of the sheer black dress part on separate photoshop layers. It should be easy to work with the sheerness this way I think. Keep in mind that with sheer fabric, when you fold it or crease it or layer it with another layer of the same fabric the color will look darker. The way I the black sheer fabric on her dress is that it has a lot of creases for fancy-ness and lots of folds, like how I drew it. I'll provide the reference I used at the bottom of this tutorial. Now...

Just like with the boob flowers, change the layer to "Multiply" and then change the opacity to 85%. Next create a new layer and get out your favorite airbrush type photoshop brush and start brushing the black in a stroke motion that goes along with the fabric, but make the edges appear darker like in the picture. The stroke motion starts to look like creases when you come close to the finished product.

C:  It should start to look like something like that, see where the fabric creases are coming in from?

I found it easier to alternate between smaller brushes and larger brushes when working with this. Don't try to blend the fabric, unless you plan on having a the fabric be solidly blended into the color of the background you chose, which that doesn't always look good. I rely heavily on the pressure sensitivity on my tablet for this kind of detail work. ( I hope I explained that right.)

Once you have the very bottom portion finished work on the next part of the bottom layer like shown. Now because I didn't feel like playing it dangerously I created another layer and used the same stroking method I used just a bit ago, but making it a bit dark since it's floating over another piece of the sheer fabric. I went ahead and airbrushed through it like shown so the edge would appear darker when I go to brush in the rest of the sheer black dress layer

Now... Once finished with the black strokes for the fabric, I change my eraser brush to an airbrush, so that way when I erase stuff, it would have a soft edge. Once changed, I gently erase a touch of the dress over her leg to... make sure the whole "sheer" thing gets across to the person who is viewing the picture. Merge the two layers that you were working on.

Next is to add sparkles to the dress to match the boob flowers. After merging the those two layers that you did the stroking black method on the dress, now create another new layer. This layer, starting from the very bottom part of the sheer black portion of the dress, add in the sparkles using the same brushes that you used for the sparkles on the boob flowers. Add the sparkles and then using the airbrush eraser, gently erase some of the sparkles. Not completely! Just enough to make some be there to create some softness to certain portions of the dress. That probably didn't make sense much but oh well, it's 3 am. :D!

Now with the next black sheer dress layer, repeat the last steps you did for the bottom layer. C: If you have trouble spotting where the edges are exactly on that dress layer, turn your some of your layers to invisibility mode by clicking on the little eye balls. Just remember you can't draw on a layer when it's invisible. When the the black sheer dress is complete, lets add a little more star glitz and glam to the bottom portion of the dress! (Yes, we are STILL adding stuff to that part of the picture.) I recently downloaded the cute star brushes from this website --> Celestial-star.net On a new layer above the sparkle layer I added one brush at a time to distort, reshape, and resize the brushes to how I see fit. You may have to use a star brush pattern on each of it's own layer just to safely and successfully move the stars around to how you see fit.

You can also use the eraser (while be set to airbrush mode) to make them appear not so all over the place. This is what I came up with. :3 Next is the jewelry, the eyes and face. Now we are almost finished!

The blush and the lips should be pretty easy to do. With an airbrush type brush gently brush it onto her cheeks for more color in her skin. C: I sometimes add the shiny dots, it helps with the chibi cuteness. For the lips I flat colored with a dark pink shade and then used a lighter pink shade over it and added white to make her lips look glossy. What possessed me to stay up at 3:30 am typing this tutorial up when I have to wake up at 6:00 am? Oh well. Next I flat colored the eyes grey, and drew a white line to indicate where the shadows should fall on her eye balls. Next I gently blend the white in her eye, but leaving majority of the grey in the upper most portion of her eyes.

Much like this. Yup. XD.

Next is to add details in her eyes. :3

 Adding effects, make a new layer and then with a bright and obnoxious color... I probably should have used purple or teal to make it different, but I didn't. Add the color on her eyes like so and then change the layer to "Overlay"

 It should have an effect much like this.

Back on the sparkle layer I added the white glossy-ness to her eyes to make them appear sparkly and glossy. :3 Last bit is the jewelry! Wow this is the longest post on my blog EVER. Almost 4:00 am too. WHEWWWWW.

 The jewelry is easy to figure out too. On the lineart layer I made the pearls appear slightly darker then added a touch of light pink to them.

After the touch of the light pink I added some white spots. A bigger spot on the top of the pearl and the smaller spot on the bottom of the pearl. Those two white spots really add to the pearls. The moons and stars, I just used the same color as the brown lines and gently shaded them with the color. and then added white glossyness to the moons and stars. I am so finished. XD;

Luna is one of favorite characters from Sailor Moon. She's an adorable character, and her human form is very pretty. I tried to draw her human form a long time ago but didn't get around to finishing it. So... my first time actually finishing a picture of Luna ;3 I know I added more to her dress, but...I wanted too.
References used: Minitokyo.net
Brushes: Celestial-star.net
I really hope that this was helpful in some ways. If not I am sorry. Very sorry. My next coloring tutorial will be a Paint Tool Sai tutorial! ;3 Shall be coming soon.