Coloring a Black and White Drawing

Start with a white background, create a new layer and sketch in your figure.

I am doing a sort of, maybe, kinda anime head. LOL! It's my husband's fault. He's playing Robotech in the background. Blech! *shiver*

This method of painting means starting with a greyscale image, and really works well with a tightly developed pencil. Here though, we are gonna work with a photoshop illustration that we will flesh out.

I am developing my light source now. So that I know where to place highlights and shadows.

The shape of the forms are coming out now... This is done with a black color and a large brush set to 10% opacity.

Build the greyscale depth.

Brush goes down to about 5% opacity and even more greys go in, building the face forms.

And more grey yet! LOL!

This will go one for a while yet.

He's now at the point where you blend and soften a little. I've built up the greys and sculpted his face with shadow and highlight. Now I am just fine tuning.

The scale was flat...not intense enough. So I kept at it... worked more shading in. And did a final fine tuning blend where I had rough areas.

Okay, at this stage, I have two layers... a white background layer, and my greyscale drawing above that.

Now I create a third layer on top of everything. I Set that layer to "Overlay" setting. and I go in with a semi opaque brush set to about %30 and pink up all the areas on the face where blood is close to the surface. I use a pretty warm red for this. The nose and lips are the big areas. The eyes have some too, and I spritz it onto the cheeks as well. It warms the flesh tones later one.

Okay, now comes the fun part. Between the greyscale layer and the "Overlay" layer, I make a new layer and set it to "color" mode. You all can email me for questions at webcomic_art@yahoo.com if you have trouble figuring out how to set the layers to different things.

Once that layer is set to "color", then I pick a deep peachy color and just go over the entire work, wherever there is flesh showing. I have the brush set to about 65% for this.

Then I grab a turqouise blue color, set my brush to about 25% and hit areas where veining and other subcutaneous colorations appear blue. The larger orbital socket around the eye is a big area for this. but shadows can also be done with this.

This is a great opportunity to make use of complimentary colors for shading.

Ah, nearly done!

Here I flatten the image. Then I added some smoothing, reshaping and highlights to nose, lips and eyes.

And for the grand finale, I grabbed a big brush and threw some clothing on him AND then I used the contrast settings to brighten him.

Once that was done, I simply went in and did some color adjusting, uping the red and yellow content.

And Viola! Try it for yourself!