The Portrait Painting Techniques of Adding Color!

In this lesson, we will use portrait painting techniques of introducing color to your black and white digital drawing from the previous lesson.

Since you are working with a previous drawing, this method allows you to quickly add color without too much hassle as you already see the shadows and light from your composition.

The primary digital tools that we will be using are your digital brushes, the eraser, the smudge tool, and a few extra blending modes in layers box.

When you are ready, bring up your monochromatic drawing and let's start giving it some color with the portrait painting techniques outlined in this lesson!

1. How to paint the base color

Rather than paint over your black and white digital drawing, we are going to use it to form multiple layers of base colors.

First, you must duplicate the black and white drawing onto another layer. From there, we are going to fill the copied layer with your desired skin tone.

As we are dealing with a lot of skin tone on portraits, it's a good idea to pick a nice flat color.

When you fill it, choose the 'color' blend mode so it fills it up in a way that does not wreck too much of your hard work.

Here's the fun part. Set your skin layer's opacity to around 50%. We are not going to erase your skin layer to reveal the black and white drawing underneath.

Obviously, you should have your black and white layer underneath your filled skin color layer for this to work.

The areas you need to erase on the skin layer are the parts leading up to the portrait's shirt, bits of the eyes to show the white areas, ear openings, nostril openings, and the back of the head.

You can start smudging areas where the colors seems a bit out of place or erase lightly to bring out more of your drawing underneath.

2. New layers for portrait paintings

The portrait painting techniques to get the base colors down will not work for all layers. This is because you need to repaint areas where you do not want to show the colors underneath.

For instance, the big picture here is to paint the hair so that it covers over the face. What I recommend is to duplicate your black and white drawing again.

This time, fill it with the hair color and start erasing big chunks of it to form the hair.

After that, instead of setting the opacity on 50%, keep it on 100% and begin redrawing the hair of your subject.

At the same time, you need to think about other parts of the face. What are his eye colors? What is the lip color you are going to use?

You can either paint on the existing base color layer or do it on a separate layer. To keep things simple, I recommend doing it on one layer.

Since you have the black and white under painting, it will be easy to get your details back.

Anyway, continue to work on the details of the face as you repaint areas that your flat color layer covered over.

3. Painting the light

At this point, you should repaint the lighten areas to show where you light source is. First, you need to preserve the transparency of all your layers.

Then, you will need to pick up a large soft brush and glaze of the outer perimeters of each layer. You want it as lightly as you can so your subject can match your background color.

As you work on repainting where light will hit, do not forget about the shadows either!

For example, there is a dark area where your character's hairstyle is parted from.

Other areas of interest are the ear openings, shadow underneath the top lips, the bottom lips, areas underneath the clothing, and the area underneath the chin.

Remember, since we are painting on a layer with only 50% opacity, you're allowing your details of your black and white drawing to shine through!

The ability to let you edit and reuse any work that you have done previously is a benefit of digital painting!

4. Final touches

These last portrait painting techniques involve a lot of color tweaking to your digital painting. Here, you can use whatever existing tools you feel comfortable with.

What I recommend is deciding whether or not you are comfortable with merging most of the layers together.

If you still want to tweak each element on a separate layer, then keep the layers separate. However, if you are comfortable with what you have, then you can merge the layers together.

The only difference is that it is much quicker tweaking the painting when it is on one layer versus a lot of different layers (tweaking it all individually).

Some portrait painting techniques you can use for tweaking the colors comes from internal color management tools of your program.

Personally, I fill my entire painting with a dark red tone on a separate layer and use the 'soft light' blend mode. This will unify my entire composition in a nice warm color.

Then, I copied the entire painting into its own separate layers. From there, I merged it all together and set the layer to a different blend mode to further enhance the colors.

Again, these are just some of the unlimited methods of altering the composition's colors.

For example, you can change the hue values, contrast, color variations, brightness levels, color curves, color balances, etc. Just play around with what your painting software will allow once you merged all the layers together.

One more thing, you can also repaint sections of your portrait any time you need as a means to introduce more details or to further correct the colors.

I hope you enjoy this lesson on portrait painting techniques for digital art. Feel free to submit your digital painting to this site's gallery so I can see your progress!

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