Your art is so pretty! I was watching your timelapse videos and wondering- how do you lay skintone and colors down over the grayscale like that? I’ve seen other artists do it too but I can’t figure it out, is it some layering thing my art program doesn’t have?
Oh gosh thank you so much for thinking so! Let me see if I can explain my process (please bear with me I’m not the best at explaining anything). To preface, I use Procreate, but I think there are similar layer modes on other art programs.
Greyscale is where I set my values, shade, and plan out lighting. To add colour, I clip a layer over the greyscale and set it to “hard light” at 100% opacity. I know other people use the “colour” layer mode to drop their colours in, but I like how vibrant colours can become in the “hard light” layer mode.
Side note: certain colours tend to become distorted in this layer mode, so what you see in your palette may not be the same colour when you drop it into this layer. You’ll have to fiddle around with the colour wheel to get exact colours you’re looking for.
From there, all my base colours stay in this one layer. It tends to be a messy layer anyway, which isn’t a big deal because I stack “normal” layers on top for rendering and clean up.
To help with setting the mood and adjusting colours even more, I use gradient maps either on top of the greyscale or under a “hard light” layer.
Gradient maps are fun and they can be a quick way to colour too. For this one, I set the gradient map layer to “Soft Light” at 100% opacity to get a spooky feel.
But there you go! I hope that helps, and I apologize if it’s convoluted. I don’t ever use the same method twice because quite honestly, I tend to forget what I do. 😅 so each new piece is always a fun (or excruciating) experiment.
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