Sunday, November 10, 2013

Drawing Jesus - Lesson in grayscale and color

I've been experimenting with Saturday sessions at my school. A student at that time is taking Visual Development and he's at the point of moving into the use of tonal rendering in preparation for color. One of the things I impress upon my students is the importance of the relationship between tonal grayscale values and color. I got the message across yesterday through the use of a demo.

I started by drawing a stylized image of Jesus or a Jesus like character. I felt like this would be a good subject to work on. Here's the initial blue line drawing...

When I was comfortable moving forward I got my gray markers out and made three photocopies of the original. The first was rendered in a range of light tones with a degree of contrast within that aspect of the grayscale spectrum.


The second one was rendered using the mid-value range of grays...


The thirds was approached using the far end of the value spectrum which is the range of darks...


After class I spent some more time rendering the light value image in Photoshop using several layers of transparent tones of  color with a few opaque highlights. This is the result...


To prove my point about how important tonal values are I converted the color image to grayscale. Take a look at how the color translates to a full range of tones. Lights to middle tones to darks...


And that's the lesson for the day my friends. If you're an artist looking to improve upon your fundamentals keep in mind an example such as this one. It will help to make you more effective when creating in a visual development capacity.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for sharing these process pictures. like I mentioned before this type of posts are really informative.