LESSON 21 · COLOUR

There are two ways to get a finished colour painting: solve the values in grey first and add colour afterwards, or choose colour and value together from the first stroke. Both are legitimate professional workflows, both have real limits, and this lesson shows you exactly what those limits are so you can pick the right one for the job.

SOFTWARE

Finish first: L17, L18, L20

• A finished greyscale value study — your L16 or L17 work is ideal
• Your L19 saved palettes
• Photoshop, Layers panel open, blend mode dropdown within reach

WATCH

PHLEARN — Teaches the layer stack, blending modes and non-destructive editing on a current Photoshop build - the mechanics the 2021 Marco Bucci demo relies on.

Sogand Illustration — Sketch-to-base-colour illustration pass in current Photoshop. Shorter and lighter than the Proko original - adequate for the brushwork/colour slot but preview it before committing.

THE LESSON

The idea is simple. Because value carries the picture, get the values completely right in greyscale — where nothing distracts you — and then add hue on top. It is a genuinely useful way to work, particularly when the lighting is complicated or you are not yet sure what the image is.

The mechanics in Photoshop: finish the grey painting, then add a new layer above it, set its blend mode to Color, and paint. Color mode keeps the luminosity of the layers beneath and takes only hue and saturation from your stroke, so the values underneath survive untouched. Overlay and Soft Light layers do something different — they push value as well as hue, so they are useful for warming lit areas and cooling shadows, but they will alter your carefully built greys. Use Color for local colour, Overlay or Soft Light for the light.

A Gradient Map (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map) maps your greyscale from dark to light onto a colour ramp. Build a ramp that runs from a deep blue-violet at the black end, through a mid neutral, to a warm cream at the white end, and you get the warm-light-cool-shadow relationship from L20 across the whole image in one move. Drop the layer opacity to 40 to 70 per cent and it stops shouting.

Now the limitation nobody mentions. Blend-mode colouring cannot create saturation that the underlying value will not support. Paint a brilliant yellow in Color mode over a mid-grey and you get a dull olive, because Color mode holds the mid value and yellow only looks yellow when it is light. Over near-black or near-white areas, colour barely registers at all. This is exactly why a lot of grey-to-colour work has the same slightly grey, muted look — the workflow itself is pushing it there.

The fix is not to abandon the method, it is to finish properly. Once your colour layers are in, flatten a copy or add a normal layer on top and paint directly into it — reclaiming saturation in the halftones, warming the highlights, putting real chroma back into the shadows. Every good grey-to-colour painting ends with a direct pass.

Direct painting means choosing a colour that has the right hue, saturation and value all at once, and putting it down. This is how oil painters work, and it is what Modules 4 and 5 have been preparing you for. It demands more of you at every stroke, and it gives more back: colour is alive from the first block-in, and you never have to fight a workflow to get saturation.

Start on a mid-tone ground rather than white. Fill the background with a mid grey, or better, a colour near your subject's overall temperature at about B50. Painting on white makes everything you put down look dark and makes judging value nearly impossible. From the mid-tone you work in both directions, lights and darks, which is far closer to how your eye actually compares things.

Then block in the big shapes at their correct value and colour — no detail, no edges yet. Squint at your reference until it turns into four or five flat areas and match those areas. If the block-in is right at thumbnail size, the painting is already working. If it is wrong, no amount of rendering will fix it.

Use grey-to-colour when the drawing or the lighting is the hard part, when you want to iterate on value quickly, or when a client or a brief might change the colour scheme later. Use direct painting when the colour idea is the point of the picture, when the piece is small or fast, or when you want the study to build your colour judgement — which it does, faster than anything else.

In practice most working artists do a hybrid: a quick greyscale or two-value thumbnail to test the composition, then a coloured underpainting, then direct painting on top of that. Nobody is checking which method you used. The only thing that matters is whether the finished image holds together, and the Black & White adjustment layer from L18 will tell you that in one click, whichever route you took.

PRACTICE · 45 MIN

1. Open L21-grayscale-start.psd. Spend two minutes checking the value study reads clearly at thumbnail size.
2. Duplicate the file and work on copy A. Add a Color-mode layer and block in local colours for each object.
3. Add a Soft Light layer above it: warm strokes in the lit areas, cool strokes in the shadows. Keep it under 40 per cent opacity.
4. Add a Gradient Map above everything, dark end at a deep blue-violet and light end at a warm cream, opacity around 50 per cent.
5. Add one normal layer on top and repaint the halftones with real saturation. Note how much of the piece needed this.
6. Now open copy B, hide the grey study, and fill the canvas with a mid-tone. Paint the same scene directly, from your L19 palette, blocking in big shapes first.
7. Stop copy B at 20 minutes whether it is finished or not.
8. Place both versions side by side and add a Black & White adjustment layer over both.

Done when: Two colour versions of the same subject exist side by side, and under the Black & White layer both still read as the value study you started from. Write two sentences: which one you enjoyed more, and which one is actually better.

Download these and work along with the lesson.

CHECK YOURSELF

Answer out loud first, then open each one to compare.