Some tips on painting from B&W to color
As promised! Using this last painting.
You do not want your darkest darks to be too low on the value scale: you will be colorizing shadows, and likely glazing over them to darken them. To avoid a muddy mess, make sure that the darkest darks on your HSV/HSB (hue-saturation-value) color sliders are at MOST a 9. Photoshop has a Levels feature that lets you do that quickly.
2. Start with a colored base
Sometimes I use a gradient map (which can color lights/mid values/shadows at once), but the idea is the same – you want to color on top of a picture that has NO grey in it. Pick a neutral color that’s closest to your shadows – for example, here I wanted to have a warmer skintone, so I made the shadows cool.
Here is an example of what not to do – do not pile adjustments layers on top of one another in hopes that some of them will give you a good result. Lower your opacity and learn what layer modes do! Overlay will hit your lights, Multiply will hit your shadows, and Hard Light (my favourite) will show up exactly like a colored light source would.
Slow down. This is kind of like glazing an oil painting. Pull down your saturation and leave the Jersey Shore orange for the last steps of a painting.
Real skin is transluscent and highly reactive to the environment it is in. If you look at any realist painting, you will see glazes and glazes and glazes of color packed into a single square inch of canvas. You can imitate this by playing with your brush’s HUE JITTER setting, which will make the color you pick jump around the color wheel a little. This is especially helpful when glazing shadows.
5. Use neutrals to unify your painting
Greys are great. Greys are AMAZING when you want skin to pop, and this is why the majority of classical portraiture sports a neutral background. I just went over the whole piece and punched a bit of grey-green into the background and shadows to “kill” the oversaturated color. The painting immediately started to come together.
6. Remember that this is not a coloring book
The great thing about digital painting is that your CANVAS is your palette – and this method allows you to build one. It helps establish major structures so you can focus on color and light, but chances are you will end up repainting large parts of it anyway. Don’t be afraid to!
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