STEP BY STEP // adding color to b&w

Mary Chaney

That does help, thank you very much! :)

Loish

for me, it's a really important way to make the character feel 'alive'. skin tone variation is what makes skin feel like a living surface. it also helps draw the eye towards a certain high-detail area. hope that helps :)

Mary Chaney

Thank you for sharing this! I’ve been learning a lot from your breakdown posts like this :) I was wondering, why do artists often put warmth/red on a figures hands and nose? I’ve seen it with the nose most often and I think it looks good but can’t figure out why it’s done like this?

Greg Schultz

Interesting and helpful. Thanks for your generosity in preparing and sharing.

MissChibiArtist

So interesting! It's honestly a little different than I expected! I love the addition of the color variation in the 2nd step. I've never thought of that. When I color b&w, it's just a lot of use of multiply, overlay, and soft light layers.

Loish

glad you found it useful! :)

Chloe

Thanks for sharing! I particularly loved the tip about splitting the colours of your midtones, shadows and highlights!

YesitsTijl

:D Ok, its a bit too complicated to explain via typing.. would you like me to record a video ? Or can you hop into a quick screenshare-videocall ?

kkatz art

Thank you Loish

Loish

sure! I will try to put one of those together too :)

Loish

haha sure share the trick with me!!

Loish

i just intuitively landed on those colors, they 'feel right' to me!

Loish

definitely! the only difference in procreate is that the color balance tool works slightly differently, acting more like 'selective color' in photoshop. but for the rest, the process is the same!

Loish

I just select the color layer (control + click) and on a new layer, use the bucket tool to fill that selection.

kkatz art

How do you create the silhouette

Anastasia

Thank you for this process! It's really interesting and useful 🤩

Appreciate this, thank you!! Makes me want to get my tablet out. 😁

Abby Warner

Can you do this on procreate?

Kelly Lewellyn

What made you choose blue, purple, and green as your main color variations?

YesitsTijl

Very nice! 🙂 I especially love your technique in step 2. I’m going to start using that... great way of having some color variation from the start! Btw... do you ever reach step 7..and suddenly have the feeling that you don’t like the color palette at all.. and wanna go a different direction entirely? I have a cool little trick I like to use in those situations 😁 Its not just a hue adjust, its a fun way to experiment with random color combinations and variations on your existing piece... and it’s an amazing “happy accident” creator in terms of color. Let me know if you wanna know the super top secret FBI protected color trick 😁

Abby

Thank you, I was really hoping to see a step by step of how you coloured the full colour one, I know you weren't as happy with it but its more the style I go for so would really appreciate if you'd pretty please help us learn how to do it! :)