Why You Should Paint in GREYSCALE! | (Concept Art) (Digital Illustration)
Why you should paint in greyscale! And is it better than painting in color? In this video let me explain why painting in greyscale or black and white has certain advantages over painting in color!
So learning how to paint in greyscale and why it's just as important as painting in color. A few reasons one might want to use greyscale when creating concept art is one: It allows you to strictly focus on shading while not making you worry about color theory. This is huge when you try to explore different character, prop and environment design because it lets you strictly focus on shape language, how the character or object is reading and how the light is casting. In this specific piece I worked with a scifi theme and wanted to give this female character a powerful yet straight forward and easy to read pose.
A note to comment on between a concept artist and an illustrator (while this is not always an absolute, meaning there is grey area in this topic. (no pun intended)) is that for the most part a concept artist wants to create a straight forward shot depicting their object or character with easy to read detail and basic lighting to demonstrate the overall design. While on the other side the illustrator's job is to use dynamic lighting and posing to really draw the viewer in and spark some emotion when viewing the piece.
But I digress. Touching back on the importance of painting in greyscale rather than in full color is that when focusing on your lighting you can really use use the basic value theme from white to a dark grey. Personally, I wouldn't go to complete black as usually indicates a complete absence of light. Now this is extremely nice because when working in color you have to worry about shifts in hue and saturation due to the fact that when actually looking at how light and color relates to one another the brighter something gets the warmer the color gets and vice versa as the color goes into shadows the color appears cooler.
Alright so another advantage to painting in greyscale is not really knowing what colors to use. Now I briefly said how you didn't have to worry about color theory in the beginning of this video but it really is a nice advantage. I can't tell you how many times I've started pieces by laying down flat colors and just not liking any of the options I'm laying down. This can be a huge waste of time which brings me to a side point that you may have picked up on or realized by now is that greyscale can speed up your workflow tremendously!
But now something you might be asking me in the comments below is "TJ...how do you add color afterwards because I really don't want to have to paint this all over again later in color." So here's the great part about this. You can add color right on top of your greyscale design and achieve the same result using gradient maps!
Now what are gradient maps? A gradient is basically a blend between two or more colors allowing you to create a smooth transition and the gradient map feature will apply those colors to the highlights and shadows of your artwork.
Now hopefully these tips helped you out and you enjoyed this video overall. Again I apologize that I sound sick in this video but hopefully that won't last to much longer.
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