2D Toolkit - Value Painting (28/02/25)

In this lesson. Sam went through his method of how he does a value paint. We spent this lesson trying to do a lineless value painting using his methods as well as developing our own preferred way to do it.

If we wanted to paint a pencil sketch digitally, it's best to:

• Import the image into photoshop
• Experiment with the brightness and levels to suit the mood of the painting
• Adjust the opacity
• Change the lineart setting to multiple
• Paint underneath the layer

Before painting, you need to decide the mood of the painting as well as the direction of the light source. This will let you know what tones you want to use as well as where to place them.

I decided to do my painting in greyscale and to use an old thumbnail I had from the first toolkit formative. I decided to use 3 values initially to start simple and practice. I lowered the opacity of the sketch and set it to multiply to block out the colours and decide where the light source is coming from. I then made the decision to have the light source come from off the canvas and on the right side.

Sam came over and advised that I should use another lighter shade to help me start filling in the details. I started trying to apply details around the shapes on the face and clothes. I tried to make a faint fuzzy texture on the wings to show that they're feathers. Below is where I decided to leave my value painting. I'm not entirely confident when it comes to adding details so I'd like to revisit this exercise when I have the time to experiment more.