What you'll learn

In this series of tutorials, we'll be focusing on painting values in grayscale and how to preserve them when applying color to our grayscale illustration in Photoshop. We'll begin this process by establishing the direction of our light source and adding some base values. From there we'll explore a layered workflow of developing our shadows and lighting and we'll continue with refining and adding details to our grayscale composition. Finally, we will walk through a process of painting color on our grayscale illustration using various blend modes, allowing us to preserve our values. As we will see, through this process, we can render a grayscale image to completion and paint color in a non destructive fashion. Applying these techniques to your own workflow will allow you to focus on values first and save some time when painting color. Software required: Photoshop CS6.