Adding color with the fills pipeline

To give this character color, we'll use a pipeline based around fills, also called flats. Fills are a coloring technique that cuts out the silhouette of the character, or individual parts of the character. In essence, it's a layer with flat color. These serve as a mask for other layers of local color, texture, light, and shadow. In 2D animation, the efficiency of fills is also vital in replicating an image over many frames, which is much harder to do with a painterly approach. We will create an overall character flat, followed by additional layers for individual components of our alien.

Silhouette and local color

The first fill is a silhouette of the whole character. This will...