Grayscale To Color Art Process ... and why I don't use it

many people have asked me for tips about going from greyscale to color in their paintings and spoiler alert I'll eventually tell you why I don't favor that technique but let's discuss I think most of us know that values do the heavy lifting in a painting values establish important things like light and form now while color can really add to the impact of a picture working with color and value at the same time can be a bit of a brain stretch so it makes perfect sense to separate the value stage from the color stage so bear with me here as I paint something that we can go back to throughout this lesson I'm just trying to put something together that has a nice sense of light and shadow some half-decent brushwork some clear form you know something that feels completes enough except for its lack of color great so we have this grayscale painting where the values have been worked out but let's stop that train right here because it is not just values that I've dealt with I look at painting as a combination of four fundamentals shapes values edges and color and that grayscale painting I just did deals with all three of these color has been segregated but okay no problem let's see if we can now bring color into this painting I'll make a new layer and set it to color mode which in Photoshop is just located down here and I'll use a soft airbrush and begin brushing in some flesh tones this process has been covered by roughly 1 billion other YouTube channels so I'm gonna go ahead and assume that you know that you shouldn't just use one flesh color that flesh has many different hues in it so I'm trying to do that I'm trying to block in different hues mixing them together of course I'm also trying to find a color scheme for the background I'm thinking maybe just more saturated versions of the flesh tone might be nice the purples in the hair give me opportunities to move from warms to cools like from reds and yellows to blues so again trying to come up with a color scheme from scratch here relying on my values to be the pillars of form and light that's an important lesson we can take away from this when your shapes values and edges are working you can assign any color to them and it will still look like form and lights I could have made her a blue alien and it still would have worked so figuring out your shapes values and edges first can help alleviate some of the stress of the process so I'll make a new layer and set this one to overlay mode which in Photoshop is right there overlay mode is another way to glaze color but this time it does affect my values if I'm painting light values like I'm doing now it will lighten my value sketch underneath this can be good for maybe adding a little reflected light like under the jaw like I'm doing right here I didn't quite push that enough in my grayscale stage I could also try deepening some of the shadow values in the hair and deepening the color to a richer red as I do that then I'll make another layer set this one to multiply mode I think a lot of people know this mode it darkens the layers beneath it but to ward a color so your glazing color while also darkening values and here I'm using multiply mode mostly in the shadows just to get slightly deeper tones in there you know finding some little dark accents that again we're not quite pushed enough in my grayscale stage all right so I'll take all my color layers group them and give the group a layer mask now with a little textured brush I'll paint black into the layer mask this reveals the grayscale underneath now why would I want to bring back my grayscale well against all these saturated colors Gray's have very subtle meaning they can modulate color for instance against the saturated red gray might look greenish so I want my grays to be a subtle part of this color conversation and you can check out this other video on my channel that dives more deeply into that concept but anyway I'll let this be the last part of my glazing color phase now the painting is not finished the next step of this process is to refine some of the subtleties that will allow the color to feel more like it's truly parts of the picture rather than something just glazed on top so what I'll do is I'll flatten the layers actually I'll duplicate them first just so we always have a backup flatten those layers then just do a little quick organization so I know which layers are which and now it's just a matter of using my own discretion to see what I can do to make this feel a little more unified when I say unified sometimes the color when you use this glazing technique can feel a little disconnected because after all that it was disconnected right it's something we laid over a previously completed painting and one of the difficulties about this process is that it's very hard to look ahead in time and see what the color is going to bring when you're only in greyscale so this last opaque painting process is essential because now for the first time we can judge all the fundamentals together on the canvas so I'm strengthening their connection I'm looking for transitions between colors transitions between values transitions between different objects like where the hair meets the skin and making sure the colors don't jump sporadically and feel out of context which is something that happens to me a lot when I use this technique and they'll use all kinds of brushes like right now I'm using an airbrush to kind of bring things together other times I'll use a hard brush to separate things more you know anything goes nothing I did before this is sacred I can paint over anything and that's why it's nice to have this process done on just a single layer it encourages you to kind of work the entire image rather than wrestle with what you might have on one layer versus another layer which I guess is like the overall theme of this process separating things at first combining them later where both parts are necessary another little trick you can try to push things in a more interesting direction duplicate the layer go up here to image and pick something like Auto tone now give that layer a layer mask and invert the layer mask so nothing shows through and then with a soft airbrush you can paint white into the layer mask thereby revealing the auto tone adjustment this is just something you can use to further explore the colors as you're now painting opaquely on one layer and like always when you're happy with what you've got just flatten it down back to a single layer and continue painting or if flattening layers like this makes your heart start to race just make a new layer on top of everything and paint opaquely on that okay so allow me to just finish this up I'm just tweaking things here and there this process is tedious to watch so I'll fast-forward through it here's a look at the finish and the entire grayscale to color process is now complete but our discussion is not complete let's recall this diagram because in that grayscale to color demonstration I spent a lot of time and effort basically connecting what I had purposely separated before and don't get me wrong this process works however what I felt like I was achieving was more of a crude patch job rather than something that felt seamlessly connected and expressive and I know I'm not alone I hear the same troubled sentiments echoed by many of the students in my classes so I have an idea as to why this colored despondency occurs and in order to examine it we need to look a little deeper at these three fundamentals so a painting is essentially a collection of shapes of value the top two fundamentals on my list I'll show you what I mean by that here's the original painting but let's go back to greyscale on it and for instance this is an overall shape of light and this is an overall shape of shadow we can look more closely than that let's zoom in here are some shapes of halftone values half tones are responsible for turning form and here are some shapes of reflected light values which are good for showing the ambient light from the environment and I could keep going here this painting is made of many many shapes of value now when the shape and value changes that indicates a change in the direction of the form and when form changes direction that reconfigures its interaction with the light which often brings along with it a color change so when we deploy a process that removes color from the equation at first let me show you how that often affects our paintings on a fundamental level on this blank canvas these few shapes of value represent the many shapes of value that exist in any given painting okay and because we're good painters our shapes are carefully considered when we go to add color we often do it in a way that doesn't respect the initial shapes in fact this approach encourages you to have your colors migrate from one shape into the next without considering why and to make things more complex our paintings have edges to edges being the third thing on my fundamentals list edges control the connection of the shapes and values which also influences the color so when we eventually glaze color over this yeah there's color in the painting now but it doesn't mean it's connected to our fundamentals in any meaningful way this is why there's that extra step that I went through earlier where I flattened all the layers and spent time painting opaquely making sure my colors interacted correctly with everything else and again while this process technically does work to me it comes at the dire cost of two things expression and fun and I guess I'm unleashing my full bias now so when you two not to deal with color up front I feel like you're creating a problem rather than solving one it's like you're mortgaging color treating it like a bill to pay off later and when that bill comes due well how do you feel about paying bills it's just not the place I want to be in when I'm painting I recently got to illustrate a book for Disney's The Nutcracker now that is a film full of intricate color palettes and this was one of the more complex scenes I painted if we zoom into Clara here one of my main conceptions for the color palette was that Clara's dress would include saturated versions of all the colors in the painting all of them weaving together in this hopefully expressive and abstract way and in other areas of the painting those colors would exist but in more muted versions like you can see this woman here has those colors but slightly more muted moving over here same thing but in different doses and I could keep scrolling through and you'd see this motif appearing over and over throughout this painting the benefits of working straight away with color is maybe most evident in this wall here the only way I was able to include all these little shifts in color and have it feel cohesive was to include color in every decision from the start every value change every shape change every little edge carried with it a color consideration and that maybe sounds technical it was just the opposite it was fun painting this and I think that's evident just by looking at it it looks like I was a kindergarten kid splashing color around for me it really enhances the painting experience when your colors are also giving you feedback as you build the picture working straight away with color can help improve your brushwork as well and I'll show you what I mean let's zoom back into Clara here again looking at this part of her dress if I switch this to grayscale suddenly all those little brushstrokes kind of mean a little less what I'm trying to say is if I had painted this in grayscale first it probably would not have occurred to me to make brushstrokes like this and why is that well switching back to color the color was embedded in the design as I painted so I would get a color like this and use a broken textured brush to glaze in color like that then from there maybe I had grabbed a smudge tool switched to a different kind of color and smudge those around color is an integral part of this conversation connected to the other three fundamentals if I had painted entire image in greyscale and now had that color mortgage to pay off you know make a new layer set it to color mode and from scratch had to figure out a color palette that could bind all the elements of this illustration oh boy I would rather I would let's just say I would brace myself for disappointment if you're timid about this here try this quick experiment divide a canvas in half and on the Left paint up an abstract filled with random brushes shapes values edges colors just you know go with it let something happen no right or wrong without a whole lot of effort you'll probably come out with something that looks expressive and painterly and fun now on the other side of the canvas try the same thing but start with grayscale building up an abstract little painting here and now go through the usual process of glazing color on top and just take mental note of any subtle differences I noticed that not only did the painting on the Left take me less time but a natural look came about much more easily I think you can see how the color on the Left seems a little more connected on the right I kind of feel like I'm painting over glass or something and if there's one thing I know to be true about art the way your process feels to you has a significant bearing on the outcome all right I imagine there are some of you out there who would like to start painting directly with color but are still feeling a little faint of heart I have another solution to offer something that combines the best of both worlds here's our initial grayscale painting again but this time let's stop the process right about here we have a sketch that is clearly unfinished but the basic forms are there let's try introducing the color at this stage and I'll do it in just the same ways before with a color layer soft brush throw a basic background color on there maybe start brushing in some flesh tones so the idea here is to use this method as kind of a gateway into painting directly with color I know my sketch is far from finished so anything I do in color now is not intended to finish this painting but what it does do is it allows color into the conversation very early early enough that when I now go to flatten these layers and paint onward from here there are still plenty of decisions to make that now will include color along with everything else this kind of gateway method was what I use because I originally started painting a lot in greyscale as well and doing it this way really helped me get into just painting straight away with color then of course with experience I found that I really preferred painting straight away with color for the reasons I've already gone over but on a general skill building level I think it's great to know many different approaches especially if it's your goal to work for clients or do commissions or become professional different projects and different paintings can often modify your approach a little bit and if you know different routes to get to the end that just makes you a more versatile artist which in a commercial world means more jobs for you if that's your goal so experiment with this stuff it's worth your time alright I'm gonna cut this painting short cuz I want to show you just a few more things a more automated way to introduce color to your greyscale paintings is with something called a gradient map so here's my one grayscale layer I go down here and find gradient map don't confuse that with gradient up here down here gradient map it brings up this dialog box which I'll dock to my color window if you click on the actual gradient bar you'll get another gradient bar with which we can map different colors to different values so I just play around with this like let's say I wanted my lightest values to be like this pinkish you can click and create a new one maybe this one you can make a little bit more reddish click a new one maybe as our values get darker we'll go down into the purples anyway you can assign colors and start moving these little sliders around and Photoshop will give you live feedback on your image you can get pretty let's say experimental with this tool and look I'm not gonna sit here and tell you guys that I use this I don't use the gradient map it's just way too technical for me if I'm ever glazing color I'll just use a brush like I showed earlier but I think everything is worth exploring and the nice thing about a gradient map is that the values are automatically mapped to different colors so if I just went to my value layer here I could paint into my value sketch and the color updates automatically for me so if I wanted to go darker it's gonna color it in this case more purple if I chose a lighter value it'll assign the yellows then of course when you're happy flatten it down and go ahead and paint opaquely just like before it's an embarrassment of riches here in the digital world so many options alright let's finish up with some advice on painting straight away with color and I'm so sick of this painting let's swap it out for this trick-or-treating Batman okay so let's get going on this the first piece of advice I have right off the bat and this is a question I get a lot from students the question what color do I choose what you don't have to have the right color right away you can still think about value first and what I do with the color when I start is I usually keep all my colors existing in a kind of neutral soup of warms and cools when colors are neutral you can mix warms and cools together almost with impunity and then as the painting progresses I'll probe further in saturation both in the warms and the cools I'll just test it out and see what the painting and the palette can support but I start neutral and build out from there if colors get too saturated on me I can just go over them with more neutrals again and if there are neutral areas that I feel really should be more colorful I can still use my glazing tools like I can get an overlay brush or a color brush and just go over an area very quickly in fact I do that in this painting if you watch closely in my opinion the benefits are so massive when you add color from the start because the color truly starts becoming an expressive part of the painting rather than something that feels like it was kind of pasted on later you know in this little Batman sketch I'm finding all kinds of little color notes and color harmonies that often speak for themselves and I suddenly don't have to go render out that I or I don't have to figure out all those teeth because the little color shifts are helping suggest all that whereas if I painted this in grayscale first it would be extremely difficult to look into the future and plan for all that if you remember earlier in this lesson I said that a form change often brings with it a color change and and while that is true that is not the only reason to change color I'll change color just for the sake of changing color and when I do that I'm on the lookout for what color can do to give this painting a unique voice you know so much of what happens with color can be unexpected that's yet another reason why I think it's beneficial to invite it into the process as early as possible I guess the bottom line is as an artist I want to bring all my tools to bear which i think gives me the best possible result and I think that about wraps up our grayscale to color conversation for those who want longer painting lessons please check out my mine store for a whole variety of stuff and if you'd like to sign up for painting mentorships or critiques along with many other rewards please consider supporting this channel on patreon speaking of patreon thanks to my patrons for their ongoing generous support thank you all for watching and I will see you in another video

Channel: Marco Bucci

Views: 815,323

Keywords: marco bucci tutorial, grayscale to color tutorial, value to color art, values to colour, grayscale painting, how to paint light, form and light tutorial, digital painting tutorial, marco bucci digital painting, gradient map tutorial photoshop, color theory tutorial, painting in grayscale, painting in black and white, black and white to color, color, photoshop layers, photoshop class, how to use photoshop, art fundamentals, drawing tutorial, digital art

Id: lJitss58XKc

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Browneyesbrowndragon]

Glad I have that a watch, I'll be honest I didn't expect it to be helpful as it was. I hear the argument against greyscale a lot bit usually doesn't come with any explanation.

[u/ZombieButch]

This was a subject that came up in a since-deleted post the other day that several people expressed an interest in. I think Mario makes a convincing argument here on why to avoid or at least minimize your use of this technique.

(To be clear, he's not talking about practicing in grayscale before learning to paint in color - which is always a good suggestion! - he's talking specifically about doing a painting in grayscale and then digitally glazing color over that same painting.)