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Calico Jack and I are terrible influences on each other. An extended session of taking the piss out of the up-and-coming game Bayonetta led to creating our own terrible version, then mashing her up with another joke character idea from a party a few weeks previous… which led to Jack writing a script, me doing some images with actual effort put in, and then us getting horribly, horribly carried away, fleshing out a full cast and ending up with a story we actually quite like.

(Granted, an incredibly silly story, but hey.)

It’s a pulp-parody, possibly to be a webcomic, and we’re throwing it around under the working title of “Bulletwitch Baretta and The Gentlelady Thief”. I’ve been really enjoying drawing up the characters, combining Jack’s design ideas with my own. They’re all done in brushpen and photoshop, and I’ll be covering the colouring method I used in the next part of my Masks tutorial.

No good will come of this. But oh is it fun. Enjoy.

PS: Gun-shoes are still stupid.

If you’ve done much colouring in Photoshop, the chances are you will have come across selections and masking at some point—using the lassos and magic wand tools to cut out areas to work on to save you having to worry about colouring outside the lines and so on. In this set of tutorials I’m going to be teaching you the basics of using the next level up from that: quick mask, layer masks and clipping masks. These features are especially useful in photo-editing, but we can use them in illustration for some really handy shortcuts and effects. Rather than running a step by step on a specific final image, I’m going to be showing you around the basic techniques, so that you can use them in your own art however you like.

This lesson is going to introduce you to a tool called the quick mask. It’s kind of the middle ground selections and layer masks, and we can also use it to very quickly create a black-to-transparent lineart, something that can be incredibly useful to have.

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