Digital Painting in Grayscale

Lesson by

122K

Mark as Completed

Assignments 233Lesson NotesDownloads 2

Digital Painting in Grayscale

Lesson by

Proko

Jon Neimeister

in Digital Painting Fundamentals

122K

Mark as Completed

Assignments 233Lesson NotesDownloads 2

Now that you've seen me do it, it's your turn to practice working from a reference to understand how shapes and values work in real life!

Start with a clean drawing, do a value block-in, and then build up your painting working from general to specific details.

You're more than welcome to find your own reference, but I've also provided three references that can be found in the downloads tab for this lesson. There is an easy reference, an intermediate reference for those who'd like to try clothing a figure and painting fabric, and a hard reference with lots of costume details and fun material challenges.

Lindsey

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First exercise complete. Dunno, how long I was supposed to spend on it, but I think I put about 4.5 hours to it. I used the square brush from the downloaded brush set and a textured blender in places.

Rachel Dawn Owens

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This is really good! Nice range of values! You could add more depth if you constrained your darkest shadows for only certain areas of interest. Keep it up!

Walker

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1mo

An exercise as i work through it!

Rachel Dawn Owens

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1mo

Looks really nice! I like the subtlety of the value changes. I made a couple of adjustments to ground the figure to the environment more. I think that dark area of the chair draws too much attention, so I made it a bit lighter. Overall, this is a nice drawing. Keep it up!

Kalp Bhavsar

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2mo

Done with a mouse so already working with one hand tied behind my back. still would appreciate any and all thoughts...

Le Parisien

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2mo

Difficult exercise. I'll do better next time.

Kalp Bhavsar

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2mo

Kalp Bhavsar

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2mo

Chose my own reference and was working with a mouse did my best... Feedback??

Martha Muniz

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2mo

Good value blocking! I do notice that your light half-tones tend to lean a bit darker, so brightening the area of light would help capture the setting and also bring in more value contrast to your painting.

Jonnathan Avelino

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2mo

Really fun and interesting exercise, it helped me to make conscious decisions about what I could highlight with contrasts, and the small details that didn't need to be detailed.

Joseph Cicero

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2mo

Here is my attempt at grayscale painting. I used a Gouache brush in Clip Studio for everything (except the for the line art). This one took quite a while for me to render, probably about 7 hours over 3 days, but I'm pretty happy with it. I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with brushes and blending. I plan on rendering this same image a couple more times with different brushes to see how they work. Critiques are always welcome!

Vincent Yu

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4mo

I think the range of grayscale in my drawing is too narrow? Keep practicing~

Melanie Scearce

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4mo

I agree, You can definitely go darker with your values. Especially compared to the dark background, the figure looks a bit washed out. Good luck!

Kassjan Smyczek

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4mo

Wanted to nail it and I wasnt happy with the first result. My opinion was that it already has to feel vivid after the figure drawing phase. So I did it again. I think the second version already is better. But the oil brushes really make it hard to control the strokes. Lastly to keep control of the middletones is challenging! And greyscale should already make it simpler. I will continue doing my best. And I don't know why, but my pen rotation doesn't do anything. So I had to adjust pen rotation manually - which was time consuming. Going to google that one....

Kassjan Smyczek

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4mo

And this is my third attempt. Foudn out that my pen doesn't do rotation - so I put it on the turning wheel of my display. I think it got better, but I am still thinking too complicated and am losing myself in details.

Jesper Axelsson

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4mo

Hi @Kassjan Smyczek, nice painting! Yes I agree that the second attempt is an improvement! I've been taught that a figure drawing needs proportion, balance and rhythm. It needs all three. Part of the improvement in the second attempt, was made by improving the proportion; by raising the navel, the relationship of legs and torso got more realistic. I did a paintover were I went through your drawing and pointed out how you can improve it by improving the aspects proportion, balance and rhythm. It might be beneficial to work on the drawing in steps, to make sure that you get proportion, balance and rhythm. I did a paintover showing that in this reply https://www.proko.com/s/2WFA I hope this helps :) Let me know if you have any questions!

@arthurln

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5mo

Really hard but that's the point I guess. What was the average time this needed ? I know it's not that important but I am struggling knowing when to move forward from sketch, to block in, to rendering. Also should it have been done in one layer ? Last annoying question : what was the brush Jon Neimeister was using ? Was it in the brushes downloadable and I just didn't find it ? I quite wanted to test it.

Anska

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5mo

Here is mine, I feel it maybe ended up being a bit too dark overall.

Patrick Bosworth

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5mo

Hey @Anska there are a lot of good things happening in this, but I think your self-critique is on point, it feels like someone turned the lights off! Take a look at this shading video from Dorien Iten, I think it will help! Keep up the good work! https://www.proko.com/lesson/mind-blowing-realistic-shading-tricks/assignments

Simran

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5mo

Martha Muniz

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4mo

Nice rendering, and great job getting down the essence of the portrait. I would just recommend brightening up the area of his face that falls into the light, as not only does it add clarity, but it reinforces the composition of lights vs shadow from the original image. It helps to squint at an image to notice the shapes of light vs dark, as these are key guides when approaching a painting. Keeping the same strength and direction of light on his face also supports the believability of the lighting set-up, as it falls from above and hits his surrounding costume in the same manner. Hope this helps! :)

@barfu

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5mo

I am extremely frustrated and confused. Is this really the first assignment for this course, or am I missing a few sections of instructions? I feel like I haven't been given any instruction. The first section was like learning what numbers are, and this is like asking me to do precalculus. I don't even know where to start.

Turtle

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8mo

This was a great test and moving forward I'm going to focus more on shapes and blending. I tend to get so focused on details first. Hopefully by the end Ill be more balanced.

Rachel Dawn Owens

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8mo

”Simple to complex”, or “Big to small”. Is a good mantra to have in your head when working. I like how you painted the lighting around the head. Good work!

Rhubarb

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8mo

A couple of attempts. It was also interesting to follow along with the underpainting technique for ref #2, but I struggled with that one since I was testing out new brushes and it ended up a mess, so not including that here, lol.

Turtle

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8mo

Demo painting WIP 1: I started with line work but I have so much trouble seeing form with just lines. I try my best with line work first but eventually crack and start adding tone and then go back to reworking my lines. Currently, reworking my proportions through painting.

Nick Dahlquist

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8mo

My attempt at the demo.

Melanie Scearce

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8mo

This is great! You made beautiful work of fading those shapes in his legs to keep the focal point on his face and upper torso. Keep it up!

Amelia T.

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9mo

Here's another greyscale practice, with reference. Decided to challenge myself with a few different materials. The skirt in reference is silky, however I tried to increase the contrast to see how it will turn out.