Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Is there a draw back from painting in greyscale? (examples included)

Hi,

I thought I'd bring up an interesting issue here.

Recentely, I have been painting in grey-scale and it's been so great, and it's great for getting realistic look and depth to my paintings, however, I really do missing just messing about in colour and painting in colour.

And I've realised when I start to colour my grey-paintings, I'm now so fed up of seeing everything in grey-scale...

It was so refreshing to pick colours in PS and start messing about with colours, and then I realized, have I been missing something?

I went through my greyscale-to-colour pictures and realised, despite the values being correct (sometimes) I was missing that vibrant, full colour look.

So here's something I did - I took a few pictures/paintings that inspired me from some of the best artists on here, turned them in grey-scale and then tried to paint over them, I didn't do it so well but I think it did illustrate my point - am I missing something?

It's hard to see what you're doing with colour, mixing and blending wise, it just even seems that one streak of colour would do the job, so I was wondering if you guys have thought about this, and whether you have seen a difference, and also - what exactly are you doing? Maybe I'm missing something...

Now I'm confused whether to stick to correct-greyscale paintings, or just have fun in colour but it looks messy/uncorrect.

I can't post the comparasion pictures of the paintings I painted over to achieve the same look as the original - but it's something you can try with your favourite paintings, but here's a quick example that I did in a few minutes ..

Original colour:

link

Greyscale into colour:

link

Another greyscale painting where it looks "dull" and lack of mixing/natural colour, painted ontop of greyscale:


link