Lets do this! How I add colour on my drawings and for this I take the help of a Dalek. Here’s the finished — it’s not finished as you’ll see later — drawing with just the values.
 

The next step is to add colours on a few layers set to the blend mode colour. This means that the values are left more or less untouched. I say more or less as some colours such as yellow is problematic and might not work as intended straight out of the box with some values. Anyways, I use a few layers since this means I can paint over and under the previous colours.

See? Depending on details, I think I used three colour layers so far. Then I add an overlay layer, in this case too add some coloured tint and shadows — had I done this with a multiply layer I would have had to work a whole lot more with the opacity.
 

And then: soft light to add some highlights.

Adding details on a normal layer now. Since we now have the colours defined this is easy.

As a very small finishing touch a colour layer to give a blue reflection.

I usually do some post-colour tweaking with gradient maps and colour balance adjustment layers as well as a photo-grain filter to fuzzy it up a bit, but neither of those are pictured here.

Now. Go out there and ex-termin-ate while having some cookies.

Tried out to draw lots of fast sketches and never saving one even once. Oddly liberating. Suddenly there was no pressure and high expectations. And so far, I don’t miss any of the sketches.

I’m trying to put up a drawing practice schedule since I’ve noticed — Shock! Horror! — that I tend to do sort of the same thing over and over again. And that’s not the way to improve on things I’m bad at.

1. Try to make some life drawings once a week (being a shut-in makes this a bit difficult)
2. Mondays: gesture sketches. Loose stuff.
3. Tuesdays: do some fundamentals.
4. Fridays: paint a still from a film/tv-show.
5. Weekends are for analogue. No digital works.
6. Sundays: review the week’s output.

I should probably try and do more Illustration Fridays as well in order to get away from the usual themes.

Looked at the portraits of series one — September 2010 to January 2011 — and it’s silly how the layered improvements are in time. It’s also quite obvious to me about which I felt more confident in drawing, there’s a sloppiness when I doubt myself.

Not that I dislike the old work, I don’t. There are always thing in them that I like.  It’s just that I feel a bit awkward about them now. Like I should have tried harder. It’s a silly thing to do. Silly and stupid and even more stupid.

All done in Manga studio this time. Learning how to use the sketch layers and how they don’t appear when exported unless you force them to. I’m not sure I’ll ever love using this program for colour but for black and white line and tone? I just want to squeeze it and hug it and dub it Sir George.

I like discovering new things, finding out how to use it to something I hadn’t thought about before. This is a big thing when you see how I’ve been using Photoshop and never really nailed down to a style properly.

I’ve gone from Deluxe Paint on the Amiga to Photoshop 3 to Painter 4 (with a mouse no less!) to newer Photoshops to newer Painter back to Photoshop to Illustrator to Sai and then back to Photoshop. The Sai to Photoshop switch was mainly due to memory and Sai workspace. Had that one existed as a 64bit program I might never had done that and then I’d be somewhere else.  It wouldn’t have been bad, just different. I’d probably not add grains when finishing something with colour, or trying to get visible brush strokes here and there.

The thing is, every change every time I’ve tried out something new I’ve benefited in every program — it is pretty much like trying out different types of paint, they all have their quirks but through those the mind finds new ways to work. The Illustrator was essential to parts of how I do colour and how I sketch things. I loved that calligraphy brush, the program is quite underrated for drawings. This is one of those Illustrator pieces and probably 98% of it is made with the calligraphy brush:

Sketching more in a moleskin helps too but most of my evolution has happened with digital. I have been eyeing things like ZBrush, not having much experience with 3D tools at all. (Tried Maya, head still hurts.)

I tried to do that thing where you take a sketch and clean it up into outlines straight away. It was a complete failure.

This is the fast moleskin sketch I made yesterday while on the train. (A) is where I tired to do proper outlines first — even tired to improve things with halftones — and (B) is my way of doing all the values on top of the sketch and then do the outline. I’ll stick with B I think. 

giantsquidandlocomotives replied to your photo:steampunish colour (by Nn.) Now in colour! Gosh!…

i don’t know how you do it. this is beautiful!

Gosh, thank you!

The “trick” is to have good values in grescale. When I then add a colour layer for base colours, it applies nicely to the areas that are not too white or black. Then on top of that I usually have a soft light layer or two to add some other colours to mix it up a bit — it’s easier to make gradual shifts with them as well as keeping the colour muted. One of the negative things about the colour layers are that they often can be a bit bright in the hue. One can do it with other colour layers too if one don’t like using soft light — it brings other difficulties — but then you’d need to play a lot with the layer opacity.

A blue/green gradient layer on low opacity also works wonder to bring down the harshness of the colour layer. Sort of like a very low-key cross-processing.

Examples with the dress. (1) Grescale. I’ve used a colour-balance layer to add a bit of a brownish foundation.
 

(2) This is the red colour layer. Very harsh and can be a bit of a pain to find the right red, the slightest variation can make a great deal when applies on a colour layer.

(3) The “cross-processed” gradient-map (#24305a at 80% opacity graded to #c5d682 at 20% opacity) to make it a bit more muted. That layer is also set to 29% opacity. Lots of that going on or it will look very blue/green.