This technique has always mystified me - my colours would just turn out muddy and dark. Now at least I have an idea. Thanks for sharing. :)

Were you using multiply? I find that results in very dark, murky colors. Overlay brightens up, or darkens, depending on what colors you use.

I love this technique. haha

Ha I did a doubletake at your name

It's memorable, hence why I changed to it. :B

I've tried coloring greyscale before with poor luck. This is exactly the help I needed to get a proper start at it. Thanks so much!!

I'm only just getting into it. Being a traditional painter, I tend to like just to lay the colors down. It's faster, and I tend not to have a problem with rendering in color. I like to learn new things though :P

One of my problems has always been just laying color over the picture itself and it being too dark like you mentioned. I have CS3 but am very novice and don't tend to do a lot of experimentation, so even the tip of adjusting the levels is a big help. I think using another layer or more will help a lot too. Thanks again! XD

I love laying a solid color layer underneath.. SO much like cell shading.. and then using overlay to highlight. So much like this, with an additional layer underneath.

I meant cell painting. Like animated movie cells.

I always used colour layers, I never realised overlay could be so effective for this. Thank you!

Familiar technique for us in the videogames industry, but dayum you put it down nicely. Good eye on the colors.

Thank you so much for this! I'll definitely have to try it myself one of these days.

Question, do you think, when painting using this style, it'll still be possible to convert the uh.. 'inaccurate' light values to proper values to their correct....values?

And by "convert" I guess I mean simply - to paint in what's missing. Or will that be too time consuming / doing things the long way around?

Yeah totally. I tend to do a finishing layer over everything where I just color-pick and paint in where I think it needs to be pushed one way or another. It's exactly like doing a real media grisaille painting. You put down black and white to get the values, glaze, and then finish with spot painting. There's no wrong way to do it, and if you do it enough, you can paint quickly.

Awesome, it'll be something worth trying when I'm learning at least *nods*

Thank you for taking the time to reply! Appreciate it < 3

this route might work wounders for me. i can get good tones , and shadows with traditional gray scales pencils but doing that digital seems to allowed me.

Nice to see how you approach this, I've played with it before often in hit or miss (more miss than hit)
Thank you for sharing :D

Very helpful and surprisingly easy. I always struggle with color tones especially when making backgrounds.

it also good to have "grayscale' shades actully done purple\yellowish two-color (very low saturation), and multiply it on top of color layer , then colors would look more natural c.c

Great information!

On an totally unrelated note - how the heck do you all you guys upload these tall images without FA resizing them?

Nevermind, I got it! Only my computer died and ate the story I wrote. Ugghhhh now I have to try and remember everything I wrote. >:(

thanks hibbary.

It is indeed nice to see the color layer by itself.

I discovered greyscales only today and this simple but effective tutorial helped me a lot. Thank you!