Hello! My name is Liz Staley and I’m a long-time user of Clip Studio Paint (I started using the program back when it was known as Manga Studio 4!). I was a beta-tester on the Manga Studio 5 program and for Clip Studio Paint, and I have written three books and several video courses about the program. Many of you probably know my name from those books, in fact. I write weekly posts on Graphixly.com and on CSP Tips, so be sure to come back every week to learn more Clip Studio Tips and Tricks from me!

One art tip that everyone will hear is to shade with grayscale and then glaze colors over it. This helps you check your contrast and values, allowing you to make shading that has the right amount of depth. This week we’re going to take a grayscale traditional media drawing and add digital color to it to finish it. 

Let’s do some coloring!

Adding Color to a Grayscale Drawing

First we’ll need a grayscale image, of course! I chose this one that I made in my sketchbook with some gray markers, but you can do this process with an image that you painted digitally, created with graphite pencil, or any other process for gray scale shading. Because of the limited amount of markers I had, I already know that I’m going to do some additional shading and highlighting to create more depth, but we’ll get to that in a few steps!

After shading your image in grayscale (or preparing your grayscale image according to the instructions in my previous article if you created it with traditional media!), create a new layer above the image and set the Blending Mode to “Color”. Then use a brush or pen tool to add base colors over the drawing. To make this easier you can see that I selected around my drawing and inverted the selection so that my colors wouldn’t spill into the background.

You may have to adjust some of your base colors to get the shade that you really want. Also this technique doesn’t work well for areas that are supposed to be white or black. For instance, in my image I wanted the sword sheath to be darker but any color darker than navy blue didn’t show up well because of the Color blending mode. You can either do these areas later on a different layer or just adjust with additional shading and highlighting later (which is what I’m doing for my image!)

To deepen the shadows and add some color variation, create a new layer and set it to Multiply. I also lowered the opacity to about 50%. Use a shadow color - I chose a dark purple - to deepen some of the shadows. I used a watercolor brush and the Blend tool to blend the darker areas out.

I repeated this process on another Multiply layer with a dark reddish color. This time I kept the opacity at 100%.

Now let’s push the lighting some more! Create a new layer and set it to the Screen blending mode and around 60-70% opacity. Use a brush to add a light color to the areas closer to the light source of your image.

At this point I evaluated and decided I wanted to push the light areas even further for more contrast, so I created a Lighten layer and around 80% Opacity and added more of my light color while concentrating on the skin areas like the muscles of the arm and the folds of the clothes.

Now let’s do a bit of color correction on the skin shadows. I don’t like how ‘muddy’ they look! Choose the base skin color and then use the color selector to choose a more saturated version of the skin tone.

On an Overlay layer, put the more saturated color over the skin shadows.

You can use this same technique to add some red areas to the skin, like on the cheeks, nose, elbows, fingers, and knees.

Let’s finish with some final details like white highlights in the eyes and shading a few strands of hair to add some extra detail.

Add any other finishing touches you want to, and you’re done! 

Conclusion

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