Digital Painting in Grayscale
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lesson video
Digital Painting in Grayscale
courseDigital Painting FundamentalsSelected 2 parts (97 lessons)
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assignments 197 submissions
@philipp_stein
Hey jo people,  here are my submissions for the assignment, I spend about two evenings on one piece, my most obvious weak points I think are the hands and feet.  Something that I really need to work on is keeping a consistent edge quality when working with a textured brush, as I find myself losing control more often than not and getting a muddied result in the end. I hope you like my pieces and feedback of any sort is greatly appreciated.
LESSON NOTES

In this digital painting fundamentals lesson you’ll learn about grayscale painting from reference! Jon shows you how to lay-in an accurate initial drawing and then work with shapes and values. He’ll also show you some ways you can utilize your software to its full potential. 

Related Links:
Getting Started with Digital Painting
How to Draw a Figure
Digital Painting Basics - Simple Forms to Complex Paintings

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Assignment-Images.zip
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digital-painting-in-grayscale.mp4
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digital-painting-in-grayscale-captions-english.srt
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digital-painting-in-grayscale-captions-spanish.srt
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ASSIGNMENTS

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. 

@alli1245
22h
this was my go at it, im pretty happy with it but I feel like I could have done better
@aouenich
Here is my firts submission for grey scale (i think) had some difficulties during blendin with my galaxy tab and studio paint
Rachel Dawn Owens
This looks really great! The figure is just too close to the value of the background. You can push the lighter values on the figure way lighter and I think that would work well for this painting. Hope this helps. Keep it up!
Arca Ludo
18d
I'm not yet good enough at figure drawing so instead of a person I drew a biten apple which is much easier.
@alexmolaver
I managed to make a brush in procreate that's similar to the custom one used in the demo (wish it was either provided like the other brushes or not used to make it easier to follow along and learn). I thought it was significantly harder to blend smooth gradients with the other brushes but this one worked well for it. I'm glad digital art isn't as hard as I was afraid it would be. Lol I've been missing out this whole time limiting myself to pencil and paper. Being able to do things like cut and move whole parts of a drawing that are in the wrong place is amazing.
James Paris
Hello everyone, starting over this course ( trying to get better with the painting part of digital painting ) This attempt was pretty rough as I tend to draw in a more lineart oriented way. ( And I avoid realist redering in my drawings ) But it feels good to practice a new skill/ way of thinking ! Will do more in the future !
Shelby Frazier
Did these over the course of a few weeks. I'm not very experienced with painting so still trying to get more comfortable with shapes and forms, I think I've been over working to compensate since digital can't stop me the way paper can... so through the course I want to work on building confidence and letting myself get a bit looser/more painterly in addition to being able to take more creative liberties. Being limited to grayscale and still doing clothes taught be a lot about relating local color to value. I did struggle to differentiate overlapping areas that were both in light/shadow without lines, like the hand over the woman's chest-- does anyone here have any tips?
samuel burgos celedon
Este ejercicio me tomó al rededor de diez horas. Realicé la ilustración con Affinity by Canva porque es gratis. Mucho del tiempo que tardé en terminarla se debió a que no conozco muy bien las herramientas de estos programas digitales. Intenté realizar un renderizado medianamente detallado. ¿Alguna recomendación para encontrar rápidamente las herramientas de Photoshop que el instructor muestra en los videos, pero en otros programas? Agradezco de antemano cada comentario y espero que le guste a la comunidad el resultado en el que invertí mucho corazón.
Kong Vue
27d
TheLexChallenge
Here's my first try.
samuel burgos celedon
Brandon
1mo
Hey guys, I am a student from the basic course and decided to try digital recently. Sorry for the long passage below: Finished order = 2nd pic => 3rd => 4th => 1st 2 nd pic was done without knowing what I was doing and 1st pic = better but I spent a lot of time on it, just try to refine the edges which was taught by Stan and Jon; 3rd and 4th were done after watching the demo 1 and critique. Although I didnt experiment too much tools on Procreate, I did try different tools from the brush packs provided by Jon to complete the painting. The dual brush is definitely the most convenient one. I tried a few, with texture or without. Fall in love with a "Filbert thin wet clean" brush. However, I faced some struggles: 1. layer: sometimes I will draw on the wrong layers... and realize after I almost finished a part, e.g torso... anyway to fix that or any tips to remind myself to stop doing that... 2. edge control: Big shout-out to Stan in the basic course that taught me edges and value control. Although I tried to focus more on controlling the pencil in that course, I couldn't vary my edges more. In this course, the opposite issues happen; maybe I vary my edges a lot unintentionally. Not sure if that is because I am not familiar with the tools and brushes. 3. Jon mentioned painting style and brush work in the critiques, but I am not sure if I can identify any styles/brush work. I lose feet and hands in my paintings, simply because I don't know how/don't want to paint small details, is that a style or just incompetence? 4. is that normal to spend a lot of time painting a piece? coz I found it quite draining. To avoid burning out, I separate quite a few days to complete each piece even though the paintings below didn't look too detailed, sorry.
Melanie Scearce
Huge amount of improvement between the four of them. I can tell you've been paying attention to the edges lessons in the basics course :) Your most recent painting is awesome, great edge control there. On the feet and hands point, I think choosing to omit detail in those areas for the betterment of the composition is a good choice, although it depends on how it's done. For example, I think you were more successful in your most recent painting than in your first painting. The feet blend in with her shadow and obscure them in a natural way. And on the layers point -- you may just keep doing it until you get annoyed enough to stop. You could try locking your layers when you're done with them, or post a sticky note within eyesight of your workspace to remind yourself to check your layers. Nice work, Brandon!
@treekin
1mo
L Kelly Jr.
aarab ayoub
joshua whitman
Thais Barcellos
Starting the gray scale with a tomato! The human figure still is a big challenge for me so, let's go with something smaller haha
andres ovalle
And two more to go!
Alison Shelton
I feel good about what I did here. I like the impressionistic feel to it.
andres ovalle
The hardness of the brushes is still a challenge for me. I will love to get rid of the lineart, hope this course will help me to achieve.
Jonathan Fisk
I'm very new to digital painting and painting in general, so I opted for a tomato as my subject so I could focus more on learning process and the software; for the same reason, I just used the Procreate round brush, rather than one with a texture/behavior I'd have to learn at the same time as everything else, and I stuck to just 6 values. I definitely have a ways to go, but I'm still fairly happy with the results and I learned a lot along the way about how to use the brush and render more skillfully.
Jonathan Fisk
Attempt #2 after watching the demos! For this one I used the Filbert-Thick-Wet-Clean brush from the supplied brush pack since I wanted to try a looser and more painterly look, and I'm really happy with the results! I tried to go much less "paint by numbers" with my sketch and instead let myself iteratively feel it out. If I wanted to spend more time on it, I'd play a lot more with edge control (e.g., sharp, highly defined edges with the leaves, medium edges with their shadows, and very soft / almost negligible edges separating the values in the shadow region of the tomato, especially the lower left. All that said, I learned a lot while doing this piece and had a lot of fun!
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