Separate Light And Color – Digital Painting Technique

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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