Grayscale Coloring
Techniques BLOG
TIPS, TECHNIQUES & TUTORIALS
If your approach to grayscale coloring is anything like mine, you probably spend a bunch of time and effort on the main part of your picture and then you are left thinking "what am I going to do for the background??" You are probably also thinking: "I worked so hard on this picture, I don't want to mess it up by doing a bad job on the background!" Well, when you feel this way soft chalk pastels are there for you :-).
With grayscale you can take advantage of the lovely details already present in the grayscale image and just dust over the background with some light color from the soft chalk pastels because those details will come through and give your background some interest. Here are the basic steps which you will see in the following video:
Medium used in the following video:
When coloring over grayscale the gray serves as your guide. Think of it as an adult color by numbers without the numbers. Instead the darkness or lightness of the gray tells you how dark or light a color to use and where to apply it. Simply put, light colors over light grays, dark colors over dark grays and medium colors in between to seamlessly blend light and dark.
Some points to keep in mind:
Here is a little cheat sheet I provide at the beginning of the "Beautiful Creatures" grayscale coloring book: First, let's start with what "grayscale" means. Very simply put, grayscale is a range of gray shades from white to black. A grayscale image is composed exclusively of shades of gray, varying from black at the weakest intensity to white at the brightest intensity. Grayscale coloring is basically taking a grayscale image and then coloring it. Imagine coloring an old black and white photograph. That is grayscale coloring! You just color right over the grayscale. There are a couple ways to approach grayscale coloring |