Learn to Use Color Gradients to Your Advantage!

In traditional mediums, such as a pencil, you can control the pressure of your hand to simply create a color gradient. In paint, it is dependent on how much water you use along with pressure.

In the digital medium, it is no different as it depends a lot on the pressure sensitivity of the program as well as the physical drawing tool also. However, unlike real media, you won’t be able to ‘feel’ the canvas, as the drawing instrument touches it, like you would in real media!

It’s a different sensation that you need to get used to!

1. The benefits of color gradients

In the digital art world, gradients are how a series of two or more colors transition between each other. For example, the simplest gradient would be the transition between black and white. You will see various values of grey in between these two colors.

In any advanced 2d digital art program, you can have definitely have more than two colors gradients. The only limitation is how good it looks in your painting should you decide to add a few more!

Most digital art tools can render a nice gradient for you. The advantage is that it creates a smooth atmosphere of desired color. Use it to create the important background colors in your painting.

Unfortunately, as it is still a computer program, what if you want to create values in a shape that the computer program can’t fill in correctly?

This is why it’s important to learn how to do gradients and color values on the computer manually!

2. Practice those color gradients!

Let’s start with a solid brush first.

Choose your canvas size and the brush type. I would recommend a large brush so you can cover a large part of the canvas. With the digital brush, set the opacity setting to around 10-25% and the color selected on black.

Then, try if you can get the gradient from black to white. You will discover that it may take several tries going over the same area to get that effect.

A new tool you might consider is the use of the eyedropper tool.

Most programs will have a tool call an eyedropper. This tool will pick up the exact color that is on the canvas and switch it with one of the two color swabs in the tool bar.

As well, locate the blur tool and the smudge tool of the art program that you are using as you will see how those tools will aid you.

3. Make color gradients with the tools you know!

For example, if I hold the alt key in Photoshop, the brush icon will turn into the eyedropper tool for that instance.

This means that it will turn back to the brush tool when I release the alt button on the keyboard.

Along the gradient, try to match up the colors within a specific area, with the eyedropper tool, and paint it over with the newly matched color.

You will pick the smudge tool. With this tool, set it to a low pressure sensitivity setting and with a fairly large brush. Then, go over it with one or two scans.

You will find out that it blends the colors out even better than painting it manually with the eyedropper and brush tool.

However, you will also notice that it moves colors around. If you don’t want the colors to move around, try the blur tool as it’s just as helpful.

4. Marching forward

As you can see, this exercise allows you to create shadows as it gets increasingly darker the more you concentrate on painting in one area. Obviously, you will need to practice creating gradients to manipulate colors to your liking.

On the flip side, there is a technique that most artists use which is the complete opposite of what you’ve done in this exercise. And yet, it is still based on the same technique.

Let me explain. Rather than creating shadows, the object of the technique is that you start with the shadows, and then, you create light!

This is a fundamental basic of bringing things to life: how light hits the object! I will dive deeper into this later along with usage of other colors besides black and white. For now, stay motivated!

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Return from Color Gradients to the 2d Digital Art Guide.