This time I had to use correction layers because I was working with an old drawing, and that made the process a bit longer, but the principles stay the same. When I draw something new, I’m constantly checking the values to see if the drawing is clear at a small scale.

Usually, I would integrate the correction of values at the same time as I’m drawing. The method I just showed you, is not the one I normally use. In this example, you can see how much more detail a drawing can have going from 3 values to 8, however, working with only 3 forced me to simplify a lot of shapes and unnecessary details to make the character stand out more In this case, if you can draw what you want using only 3 or 5 values (you can pick the number, the point is keeping it as low as possible), that means that your drawing will still look good when you add more values later, since limiting yourself to a low number of values forces you to make your drawing easier to read. You can avoid this by focusing first on the big and most important things of your drawing. When working on any kind of drawing or painting, it’s easy to get carried away and start adding a lot of details everywhere from a very early stage, so when you take a step back and realize you made a mistake, you see that you lost a lot of time drawing details that you had to fix. Why would you chose to work with just 3 values when you can just use as many as you want?īecause it helps you focus on the important things. Until now, when working with grayscale, we were using a lot of values, that is, picking all of the values available to us inside of the value range we chose, but there are times when you might want to work with just a certain number of values, like 3 of 5. Now that we have all the tools we need to work in grayscale, we can start looking at different ways of using values, what are they useful for, and different styles. You can experiment a bit to see what works best for you, since some of your choices may differ depending on the style you draw on. It’s probably one of the most useful tools you can have to draw any type of things.

As such, there are all kinds of contrast:īut the one we will be focusing on is called: To put it simply, contrast is how different one thing is from another. To emphasize the focal point, you can do a lot of things, like using different colors or shapes, but we will be focusing on a specific tool called “CONTRAST” Usually when drawing characters, the focal point is the face, because humans are naturally attracted to faces and eyes, but when it’s a drawing of a landscape or a building, things change, and you might want your audience to focus on a specific part of the drawing, and for that, you have several tools. The focal point of a painting or drawing, is the most important part, the part that you want your audience to look at first. The first concept we need to understand, is FOCAL POINT. Composition is a huge subject, so we will not cover it completely here, just some basic concepts that will help us in regards to grayscale and monochrome art, such as manga or comics. To solve that problem, we will need to talk a bit about values in composition. However, you might consider all of these things, and draw everything properly, but you still feel like your drawing lacks something, that it’s just not right. When you consider all of these elements, you can draw properly in grayscale. I will draw a cube, the floor and a wall. Well, to decide that, there are several elements you must consider, so let’s check them first

Let’s say you want to draw a sphere, or a cube, but you don’t know what value you should paint them. As such, with this, things will react to light in a natural way, the same way they would react in real life. I will try to cover them the best I can, but to understand those kind of value ranges, we must start with a normal one, so I’ll first explain how light and values work in a more natural value range, and from there we will see the others.Ī normal value range is what you would see if you put a black and white filter over photos, or imagine it as if you suddenly couldn’t see any color, just black and white. There are also value ranges that are limited to a very specific number of values, and some that use only black and white. If you have trouble maintaining your values in a certain range, you can always fix that by playing around with the correction layer “Level correction”

Monochrome vs grayscale