Shii Chan Pro

Shii Chan Pro is an an oekaki program available online here on NeonDragonArt.com. It's got a bit more options then the paint bbs oekaki. This tutorial will help get you familiar with the pen and watercolor tools, the shii chan setup, and a basic method for creating and coloring a line art drawing.

When you open up the shii program there are not many options available. To access all of the menus and tools that shii has, you'll need to click on this box. Each bar opens up a different toolset.

After clicking everything open you can drag the menus around and arrange them however you prefer.

To start with I like to get a light, loose sketch down. I used the pen tool at 1 pixel wide and a low opacity. You can control the transparency of your brush using the "A" slider. I then begin sketching on layer 0.

Once my loose sketch is finished I turn down the opacity of layer 0 so that the lines become faint. This makes it easier to ink my final line drawing on top of it without getting confused. I will do my final inks on layer 2.

Using a higher opaqueness (A slider is higher up!) I go over my lines and make them crisp. My final linework goes on layer 2, and my color will go underneath it on layer 1. The sketch layer (0) will eventually become a background.

Since I have finished with my sketch, I color over it with a background color. I then move to layer 1 and begin coloring in my drawing. The color/mask toolbar allows me to choose a very exact color! To go through the diffent hues, move the rainbow slider up or down. Then select the tint or shade of that hue that you would like to work with. I'm still using a pen tool to color, but my brush has been taken up to 3 pixels to make coloring easier. To resample a color you used previously, hold down "crtl" and click on the color you would like to sample so you can use it again.

After finishing the colors it's time to think about a background. Go back down to layer 0 and begin your work!

Because I wanted a soft look for the background, I went with a watercolor brush for my tree texture. This gives me a very soft, transparent paint job that I can slowly build up.

Back up to the ink layer! (Layer 2) I gave Shino some bugs to play with. He is a bug ninja after all! Once my image is complete I hit "upload" and send it off! If I were to get tired in the middle and want to resume the image later, I would still hit upload, but at the final screen I would choose to do a save instead of a post. You can have one save at any given time to resume at a later date.