This is a digital painting technique I discovered recently watching other artists work.
When you are digital painting, there are two things other than composition that you need to render – light (value) and color. Doing both of them together might turn out to be cumbersome, and may some times be misleading. Using this technique, you can conentrate on painting the light and shadows first – in black and white – and then applying color to it.
Start of with painting the object in black and white in a separate layer.
Be sure to keep it in a separate layer.
I turn off the visibility of the background in GIMP and ensure that I have a clean painting in black and white of the object.
Next I start coloring the grapes in a separate layer.
It is quite an easy job. But be sure to turn the mode of the color layer to ‘Multiply’.
Once you are finished coloring the full object (with more than one color if needed), you can control the opacity of the color layer.
The coloring is done with flat – there is no requirement for shading. The underlying value layer creates the shading effect for you since the color layer is multiplied by it. Some color might spill out, but that is ok – we will be fixing it in next step.
Merge the color layer with the value layer.
Notice how all the ’spilled’ color disappears – this is because the value layer was painted on a separate transparent layer. To perform this operation in GIMP, select the color layer, and select Layer > Merge Down menu option.
This obviously does not replace the manual shading altogether – but does most of the work.
Get some highlight color with a fine brush and put in those highlights. Sometimes you will need to zoom in and give the dark shadow area, a darker shade.
If you regularly keep copies of the artwork as you progress, then it will be easier to go back and change some of the colors. If the color is painted directly, then the job becomes a bit tricky.
Are there any techniques you know that you would like to share?
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Thank you for letting me have access to your wonderful paintings and instructionals.
I am new to digital painting. I use Paint Shop Pro8 software. I have done watercolor, but I want to become fairly knowledgeable in digital.
Can you suggest a good instructional manuel?
Thank you,
Bob Staples (85 yrs. old)
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Hi Robert, I am glad that you found these small articles useful.
Since you are already versed in water colors, I do not see any problems with you transitioning to digital medium. Long back I had used Paint Shop Pro, and as far as I can remember, it is fundamentally same as other software like GIMP, Photoshop, and Corel Painter.
Coming to instructional manual – a search on Amazon shows a lot of books – but I have not tried any of them. You could learn quite a lot keeping tab on several online resources. (There is one magazine by ImagineFX that you may find useful).
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Actually never thought about this, separating the shading and coloring up. But it’s absolutely brilliant.
I wouldn’t merge the layers though, although I’m not sure if GIMP offers the same option as Photoshop does to get rid of the color over the edges.
In Photoshop you can control+click on the miniature preview of value and you’d have a selection made of the value layer, then by inverting the selection and going back to your shading layer you can delete everything around.
But it looks like a really easy and handy way for if you’re just not happy with the color, making switching from blue grapes to green grapes in example probably a piece of cake. Great tip
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I do not know of any way we can do the same as Photoshop in GIMP for the color over edges. But yes. Keeping the color layer without merging is a good option.
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show more tricks about digital painting
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Sure – I have plans of writing more articles on digital painting techniques.
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I’m amazed :O you are really good!
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Thank you, Luc!
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How neat… can’t wait to give this a try….Thank you
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That’s great! I’d also recommend experimenting with using hue mode instead of multiply. Hue mode keeps the saturation and value from the other layer, and just adds the hue from your brush. The effect is different from multiply, but sometimes just what you want!
Patrick
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Hey Patrick, did not think/use the Hue mode for a layer, but definitely, I will be experimenting with that.
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