Black-and-White to Colored Digital Painting Experiments

Hello Steemians! I am going to share to you how I was able to successfully convert Black and White digital paintings into colored ones.

All of the techniques I have are not successful over night! I invest time on practices , cried my sh*t out, depressed every single night but still wakes up trying to get it right! GUYS, IT'S OKAY TO GIVE UP TONIGHT, BUUUUUT TRY AGAIN TOMORROW!

So let me start off with this piece below, which was one of the first experiments I did with converting BnW to Colored painting,done using Adobe Photoshop CS6

To which I redid to this

But still I honestly think this is not the one, this is not the right mixture especially the skintone--- looks so muddy, there's no life to it.

Don't get me wrong with my over reaction guys, I practice aiming to improve not to settle down with what's just okay. And I genuinely appreciate other artist's techniques, we are all different (I don't know how to do that and this one artist nailed it). It's just that we have our own standards just for ourselves, we are hard on ourselves, don't try to deny it *wink.

I can even say, leaving it BnW would have been better, I also put up the process just to share how I painted it.

See, much better. The thing is, I always create in BnW ever since I resigned and it's time to actually create a colored one, the goal is to make the skin tone alive.

You can view the process of the painting below:

Now this is how I convert it to colored

(1) I added a gradient map layer

(2) Set the four colors into black, something cool, something warm, white respectively

(3) Add base color in "color" layer mode

So basically if you hide the BnW layer, this is what it looks like

(4) Add the dark shade in "color burn" layer mode

(5) And lastly, the subtle touch of colors (blush, bluish of the shadow part) which I painted in "soft light" layer mode. This will make it not flat-looking.

This is not the best but I can already see the light, the road I am trying to aim.

If you haven't seen the Go Ara artwork (just click on that link), it was a product of the experimentation, when I got used to the process.

I hope you guys learned something!

See you again next time!

Adelair