I have an odd brain (you don’t say…), and the way it works with art has always been interesting. One of those oddities is in working with grayscale vs. color.
I know plenty of artists who start with a grayscale piece and then go and color everything to make it a full color image. For some reason though, my brain just doesn’t do that. When I start a grayscale piece, I expect it to stay gray. When I start a color piece, I start every part of it in color, and go from there.
But I do have have fun sometimes returning to the old gray pieces and adding duotones or other overall colors to them. I use layer blending modes and multiple layers in Photoshop to give different overall effects. I’m not going back and coloring individual areas, but rather I’m adding colors to the overall layer and then toying with the effects.
I’m putting a couple of examples below, of pieces that started out gray and have since joined the color world. The octopus is actually a new sketch from my “2010 sketch every day” idea, you can see the original on my Flickr page here.
As always, let me know what you think, either here, Twitter or Facebook. Actually, that octopus rather unintentionally came out like a Templesmith work.
