1- INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone, Konart here, again.

 

Today I will show you how to draw in grayscale, and then, how to use that for an art style more similar to comics or manga (what some people call monochrome). Now, what does that mean? It means learning “Values”, and when you know about values, any type of drawing becomes easier, specially if you’re working in black and white, like some realistic grayscale painting, or even in manga style. At the end of this, we will see one of my old paintings, and I’ll try to apply what we learned to fix it.

 

Let’s start

 

2- VALUES

Before we start, we need to understand what values are.

To put it simply, it’s how light or dark something is in the drawing. Things have color, made by hue, saturation and value, so when we are working in grayscale, we are working only with values.

 

“But why should I care? Why do I need to learn about things in black and white, when I like to draw with colors?” you might be thinking.

 

Simple, values are one of the core fundamentals of art, it’s something as important as perspective, color, composition, anatomy, and other things. As such, the better you’re at it, the better your art will look, regardless of the style you choose to draw on. The fundamentals improve the quality of your art by a lot, so even if you don’t know how to draw something very specific like a shoe or a car, the fundamentals will make your drawing still look good.

 

3- BRUSHES

In this tutorial, we’ll be working very few brushes.

It’s important that you remember that you don’t need these same brushes, you could draw everything with the same brush, or with 20 different ones if you felt like it, this is just an example, and the only thing you need for this tutorial is one brush that has texture, one that doesn’t (for inking), and maybe a soft one, for some shadows.

 

Now we need to set up the canvas properly, and there’s several ways to do so:

 

A – Just use your standard settings, and use only gray colors. This is the way I like to work, since I don’t like changing my workflow or my work space, so I just work like I would normally, but being careful not to pick any colors. Since we’re working in only grayscale, after putting down the first tones, you can just use the color picker to avoid using your color window every time

 

B – Create a new layer on top of the one you will be drawing on, set it to color mode, and fill it with black or white. Doing this, you can be sure that there will be no colors in your drawing, and it will be just grayscale.

Personally, I use this method to check the values my drawings, even if they have color. Often, I will find that when I turn my drawings into grayscale, there are some values that don’t read well, so I turn off the grayscale filter, and fix the colors, then check it again in grayscale, repeating this several times until I’m happy with the result.

 

C- When you create a new drawing file, select the “grayscale” option. This will force you to work with just grayscale. I almost never use this option, since I want to still be able to put some color in the drawing afterwards, but if you are just practicing, this can be an effective way to ensure you don’t get distracted with colors even if you wanted to.

4- CHOOSING YOUR VALUES

When working in grayscale, the first and most important choice you must make, is to decide the range of values you will be using. Yes, you could simply use all of the values on the grayscale, from white to black, but I suggest you to do that until you have practiced this type of drawing more, also, drawing with pure black can sometimes cause some problems for printing your drawings.

So then, what values should you choose? Well, it will depend on several things, like the style you draw in, and the feeling you want to give the drawing. For example:

 

A realistic or semi realistic style, will often use almost all the values, but excluding some of the lighter ones and some of the darker ones, as a result, you almost can’t tell there really isn’t any pure black or white in the drawing. This is the range of values I usually use, even though my style is a bit more similar to anime. It’s also the range of values I would recommend using for beginners, since I think it’s the easiest one to understand.

 

If you incline your value range towards the lighter side, it will give your drawing a more pastel or ethereal feeling, something dream-like. Some anime shows use a similar filter when they are showing flashbacks, since it can also look like a memory of the past.

If you incline it towards the darker side, it can give it a more creepy or sinister feeling. Darker scenes tend to be scarier, so you might want to use this when drawing a terror manga or something similar.

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”

 

There are also value ranges that are limited to a very specific number of values, and some that use only black and white. 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.

 

5- NORMAL VALUE RANGE

A 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. As such, with this, things will react to light in a natural way, the same way they would react in real life. Let’s say you want to draw a sphere, or a cube, but you don’t know what value you should paint them. Well, to decide that, there are several elements you must consider, so let’s check them first

.

I will draw a cube, the floor and a wall. At this point, there are no values here

 

Now, I will give the cube a local value and place my source of light. The local value of an object is the value the object has naturally, not affected by lights.

Tip: The source of light will usually be a very bright value, but still not pure white

 

Now, we need to make it look like the light is affecting the cube, and we make it by lighting it up. The way you choose what places to light up, and how much to lighten them up, is by looking at the planes of your object.

Every 3D object has planes, sometimes they might not be very obvious, but in a cube they’re pretty easy to spot

Faces are difficult to draw because they have a lot of planes, and the transitions between them is very soft, that’s why I recommend you practice these principles with simple shapes first.

Now that you have the planes, look at what direction they’re facing. When light hits a plane, it will lighten up that plane depending on how much light that plane bounces to your eyes, and that depends on the angle of the plane, like how your phone sometimes reflects the sun to your eyes when it’s at a certain angle.

Taking that into consideration, let’s light up the corresponding planes of the cube.

The same principle is used to decide where to put the shadows, just in reverse. So, the planes that are facing away from the light source will be in shadow.

Now we need the shadow created from the object, and that is called a “projected shadow”. Drawing a projected shadow is tricky, you can use a lot of measurements to get them to look more accurate, but it still won’t be perfect. The best advice I can give you regarding projected shadows, is to imagine the light as a bunch of beams, and then try to trace where the beams that touch the edges of your object would fall.

I know it’s a pretty abstract concept to wrap your head around, but when I started trying to think of it that way, it made it easier and faster than making measurements, so give it a try. Now, if I’m honest with you, people don’t really care about cast shadows.

The only way people will notice if your cast shadows are wrong, is if you draw them in the wrong direction, or with the wrong size. And even then, your errors would have to be very obvious for people to notice

Just try to remember, when was the last time you saw an error in the cast shadow of the drawing from an artist you like? Chances are that there are several errors, but you never pay them any attention, because most of the times, it’s not an important part of the drawing. In fact, many artists I like do something you wouldn’t imagine: they cheat! You want to know how? It’s pretty simple, drawing an accurate cast shadow is hard, so they don’t do it, they use the object they’ve already drawn as the shadow. Let me explain.

 

Let’s imagine you have a character, and you want to draw the cast shadow. What you do is, in a new layer above the character, draw the silhouette of the character and fill it with black. It doesn’t have to be perfect.

 

Now, using the transform tool, adjust it to match the perspective of the floor and the direction of the light, and lastly, move it to the layer below your drawing.

It’s actually not a cheat, it’s just a shortcut many artists use. They use it because it saves time and effort with something that people won’t be actually looking at. You should use the tools you have to work faster, and when you’re working digitally, this is one of them.

 

Now, going back to the example with the cube, we already have the local value, the light, the shadows and the cast shadow, but then, why doesn’t it look natural? Is there something missing? Yes, a couple of things.

 

The first one, is reflected light. Remember what I told you about light bouncing off from planes? Well, light can bounce several times, however, every time it bounces, it loses strength, so you just need to think about the first bounce.

If we apply that to the cube, the main things the light will bounce of, will be the floor and the wall, so there will be a bit of bounced or reflected light in the areas of the cube that face that light.

Now, the last thing we need, is ambient occlusion.

 

To put it simple, ambient occlusion is a type of shadow that occurs in the places where light can’t reach easily. That means, this happens a lot in places where one object is in contact with another one. However, ambient occlusion is very, very subtle, so try not to overdo it or it will look weird.

If we add ambient occlusion to the cube, we can imagine it happening a bit where the cube touches the floor, and where the wall touches the floor.

 

An important thing to remember when you’re trying to make something look realistic, is that in real life, things don’t have outlines or lineart, so when you’re working in grayscale, remember to erase them. I’ve kept the outlines of the cube for explanation purposes, but if I wanted to make the cube look a bit more realistic, I would do several things, like erasing the lineart and making some of the shadows a bit blurrier.

When working in monochrome or grayscale, those are the main elements: Light, shadow, cast shadow, reflected light, and ambient occlusion.

 

Now, let’s try to apply those principles to a drawing.

First, look at this drawing, it applies all of the elements I mentioned earlier, but there is a mayor mistake.

 

The mistake is that everything has the same local value. That means, that if this picture had colors, everything would be the same color, and we know that is not the case. Different colors have different local values, for example, if you turn yellow into greyscale, the value will be much brighter than if you do that with red or blue. In a simple way, darker colors, will look darker in grayscale.

Now, if we apply that to the drawing, we get this.

Also, you might have noticed already, but these rules are not the same for every object, it depends also on the material of the object. A more reflective material will bounce more light, so it’s value will turn brighter. This means, that the more reflective a material is, the more contrast it will have.

If we consider the materials of the character, like clothes and metal, the drawing should look a bit more like this.

Tip: No matter how reflective an object is, or how strong your light source is, the light reflected on the object will not be as bright as your light source, keep that in mind and try to avoid making highlights too bright.

 

Now I will add some more details to the drawing to make it look a bit more finished, so here are some extra tips.

A- Use brushes with more texture for objects that have more texture, for example, a rough brush is great for clothing, while a soft brush or a hard brush work well with metal.

B- Try to make the sclera of the eyes JUST A BIT brighter than the skin.

C- Cast shadows tend to be blurrier the further away they are from the object, as for how blurry they are, it depends on the intensity of the light, since a very intense light will create sharper shadows, but a soft light will create more blurry ones.

D- Try not to deviate too much from the values you have established already.

 

Now we can see the difference between a drawing that only has flat shadows, and a drawing that has all of the elements that I mentioned earlier

When you consider all of these elements, you can draw properly in grayscale.

 

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. To solve that problem, we will need to talk a bit about values in composition. 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.

 

6- VALUES IN COMPOSITION

The first concept we need to understand, is FOCAL POINT.

 

The focal point of a painting or drawing, is the most important part, the part that you want your audience to look at first. 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.

 

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”

 

To put it simply, contrast is how different one thing is from another. As such, there are all kinds of contrast:

A- Color contrast

B- Rendering contrast

C- Shape contrast

But the one we will be focusing on is called:

D- Value contrast

 

It’s probably one of the most useful tools you can have to draw any type of things.

 

Since contrast is how different is one thing from another, when working with values, that means, how much brighter or darker is one thing from another, or how much distance is between the values of things.

A small difference in value means a low contrast, and a high difference in value means high contrast.

 

This means that you want the focal point of your drawing to be the point with most contrast, because that’s where the audience will look first.

Even with a drawing of a character, where you already have a clear focal point in the face, having contrast helps to make it look even better.

 

Even though on this character there’s also a lot of contrast on the legs and the sword, you can see how adding more contrast around the face makes it stand out more. The character might have clothes and hair with brighter colors so that brighter values would be technically correct, but that wouldn’t give us the contrast we need in the focal point, that is, the face.

 

When you can’t have a lot of contrast in the character itself, you can create the contrast in values with foreground or background elements. If you look at these 2 drawings, in both of them the character has exactly the same values and contrast, but the one on the right uses a black sky to create more contrast with the head of the character, which is the focal point.

 

But be careful with your use of foreground and background elements, as a general rule, the closer an object is to the camera, it will be darker and with more contrast. And when it’s further away, it will be brighter and with less contrast

Here’s a little trick for you, sometimes to have contrast, you must get rid of the contrast. What do I mean? Well, like I said, the point with most contrast becomes a focal point for your audience, but if you have a lot of contrast everywhere, your audience won’t know where to look. So, if every part of your drawing has a lot of contrast, you can create a focal point by lowering the contrast of something. Here’s an example

Here’s the same drawing as before, but now I added some elements to the background

 

To draw the birds i used this brush.

As you can see, it’s a bit uncomfortable to look at, since everything has a very high contrast. To avoid this problem, one solution is, as I said, making the focal point the spot with most contrast

But the trick I was talking about earlier, is to make the complete opposite, that is, to make the focal point the spot with less contrast of a drawing with a lot of contrast

This is not something I would use just by itself, but it goes to show you that you can have a lot of freedom with how you decide to use contrast, what types of contrast and in which objects you use it. Anime shows, for example, tend to use contrast in the amount of rendering and contrast in values. They usually have extremely rendered and detailed backgrounds with lower value contrast, and characters that have a lot of value contrast but are colored with extremely flat colors. This gives anime shows a very distinctive look.

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.

 

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.

 

7- LIMITED VALUES

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.

 

Why would you chose to work with just 3 values when you can just use as many as you want?

Because it helps you focus on the important things. 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.

You can avoid this by focusing first on the big and most important things of your drawing. 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.

 

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

 

To check if your drawing is clear, try to zoom out constantly, and if you can still distinguish the important shapes, that means your doing it well.

This is a useful tool to have since, most likely, you post your art on social media or sites focused on art, and in all of those places, your art will be displayed first as a very small image, and when people get interested in that small image, they click on it to see the larger version, so you need your image to be very clear even when it’s very small.

Another use for limiting your values, is to make thumbnails. A thumbnail is a rough sketch of your drawing before you start adding any type of details. If you are just making quick sketches, you might not need thumbnails, but when you are creating illustrations, or something that will take you a longer time, many artists recommend using multiple thumbnails. Let’s say I want to make an illustration of a character. I wouldn’t immediately start drawing it, I would make several thumbnails first to try different poses or camera angles.

After that, I can pick the one I like the most and start adding more details. This is where a limited value range is useful, since you can make your thumbnails very quick if you use a small number of values, and that allows you to explore more options for your drawing

And after you picked the one you like the most, you can add more and more values

This limited value approach to drawing is very useful when you’re trying to draw something more stylized, like cartoons, or illustrations with emphasis on graphic design

 

For example, you can flatten the values in your character, ignoring shadows, to make it look a bit more like a T.V. cartoon for kids.

 

Or use it in realistic illustrations to make them look more unique. You can draw something that looks somewhat realistic using only 6 values.

These principles work for any style, however, I find it extremely helpful to know them when you’re drawing in a manga style.

8- MANGA STYLE

First of all, there are some differences when changing from a limited value range to a manga style

 

A.- Manga style usually doesn’t have a limited amount of values. It might look that way, because sometimes manga drawings have a small amount of values, but they can use more at any time.

 

The difference might be small, but the fact that you can use gradients and any values gives you more freedom to experiment a lot of things

 

B.- Sometimes, instead of using a flat value, manga drawings use screentones.

 

You can lower the density of a screentone to make it look like a lighter value, and using different patterns can affect how light a screentone looks, so try using them to see how they look in your drawing. Also, when you’re drawing something extremely dark, that it’s close to pure black, manga tend to not use a screentone for it and just use the flat value.

 

Now, I won’t explain in detail how to use screentones, since there’s many ways to use them, and there’s a lot of them to choose from.

 

But the main thing you need to remember, is that screentones work as a replacement for values, so instead of using a specific value to shade something, you would use a specific screentone

 

Also remember, in manga you can be a bit more creative with the way you use values, for example, if you had multiple shapes with the same value on top of each other, it would be hard to distinguish them, so a common trick to use is to switch your lines from black to white, to show better the shapes

Of course, the manga style can vary a lot from one artist to another, there are manga that have a very flat and simplistic range of values, while there are others that have a lot of details and combine values with screentones, so you can have a lot of fun experimenting with what works best for you.

 

As long as you keep the fundamentals of values in mind, there are a lot of things that you can do. For example, instead of using a lot of values, you could use only 2: black and white

 

However, working with only 2 values can be difficult if you are just starting, because it requires you to already understand all of the principles I previously mentioned, so be careful.

9- FIXING OLD DRAWINGS

Now that we covered how values work, I’ll try to apply all of the principles to an old drawing of mine. You can try it too, I find it really helpful to sometime go back to an old drawing and try to see what I would fix and why, since it helps you understand a bit better the new things you’ve learned since then.

 

The painting I will be fixing has only 2 layers to start, one with the drawing, and one below that contains a mask of the character, which I use to make selections faster, but that’s about it, you don’t need anything else to try this method.

 

Next, I turn it to grayscale, but don’t flatten the image, since I still want to keep the colors underneath. So just use the color layer and fill it with black or white to turn the drawing into grayscale.

I make the adjustments using 2 types of correction layers:

 

A- Brightness/Contrast

B- Hue/Saturation/Luminosity

 

I use the correction layers directly on the painting and adjust the places I want them to affect with masks. However, when you change the color of something with a “Brightness/Contrast” layer, the colors will often lose saturation, or change hue slightly, and that’s what I use the saturation layer for, to fix that. I make the adjustments looking at the grayscale, but I constantly turn it off to see how the colors look underneath the grayscale filter.

 

In this example, I start adjusting the values of the elements in the background, It might look like I just made everything brighter, but all of the elements have different levels of adjustment, since I want the values to be a certain way.

 

Then I do the same for the character, making some areas darker and others lighter depending on what my focal point is. This is where the character mask is helpful, since it allows me to select only the character very quickly. At this point I also tend to go back to the background and make small adjustments.

As you can see, the new painting reads a lot better, that’s because the silhouette of the character is clearer and there’s a lot more contrast on the head, which is the focal point.

 

 

Another tool that i often use to check that my values are working well, is the “posterization” correction layer.

I tend to use it to turn the painting into a 3 value painting, and if it looks clear, it means that it’s going in the right direction

You can see the comparison of the old drawing and the new drawing when using posterization.

The posterization layer usually points out very well the areas where the values are not clear. For example, in the old drawing everything was darker, so even if I had contrast in my focal point, it felt unbalanced. Also, the silhouette of the character wasn’t very clear and the hat faded into the background, which is bad, because the hat is dark, and jet, it still faded into the trees, that are supposed to be a light pink.

When I turn the grayscale filter off, you can see that a lot of colors have changed, and some of them might look a bit wrong, but even with those errors, you can tell that the new drawing is easier to read. That’s why values are so important, if your values are correct, you can get away with almost any color you chose.

10- CONCLUSION

The method I just showed you, is not the one I normally use. Usually, I would integrate the correction of values at the same time as I’m drawing. When I draw something new, I’m constantly checking the values to see if the drawing is clear at a small scale. 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.

 

Here are some key points for you to remember:

1- Always check the values of your drawing

2- Decide your value range early on

3- Use the posterization layer to check if your drawing is clear

4- Start with a small amount of values, and add more when you think it’s clear.

5- Make multiple thumbnails with values to explore more ideas before starting

6- Make sure your drawing is clear even in a small size

7- Decide your focal point early on

8- Make your focal point the spot with the most contrast of the drawing

 

Many of these techniques like checking the values and using contrast and focal points, are used a lot by illustrators.

 

That’s because they usually have to plan out the illustration to make it look really good, so it’s a good idea for them to make a lot of thumbnails.

Making thumbnails and starting with a small amount of values is also useful because it allows them to show their clients a preview of the illustration very quickly, and also allows them to make big adjustments without losing a lot of time.

And a smart use of contrast and focal points is a very important thing to have in an illustration, however, this might not apply as much in other fields like concept art or manga, but it’s still good to know. The principles of using values apply to all styles of drawing or painting.

 

Try it out, surely you have some old drawings that you think you could make better nowadays, so pick one of them and try to apply these principles.

 

11- THANK YOU

I’m still kind of new to giving tutorials, so I hope I was able to explain it well enough. Also, English is not my first language, so if there are some grammatical errors feel free to tell me in the comments.

 

Thank you for reading to the very end, I really hope this tutorial was of some help to you, if it did, feel free to give it a heart and leave a comment. Also, you can check out my stuff on my instagram @ricardokonart and my twitter @RicardoKonart

See you later