Digital Painting Color Maps - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 148

Know Your Medium: Create Your Image
In traditional painting, it is important to know the rules of your medium. For example,
oil paint works best when you lay down your dark tones first and move to lighter colors.
It also works better when you begin with background elements first and then move to
details in the foreground. Watercolors, on the other hand, work best when you lay down
a diluted wash of the painting's basic colors and then add color and shading as you paint
from light to dark. Because digital painting programs often feature layer options, much
of these forward-to-backward precautions can largely be ignored, but the management of
colors is a different matter.
Digital painters have a myriad of rules for how they like to begin their work. Some
paint in black and white or grayscale tones so they can focus on shading and composi-
tion. Others swear by using flat mid-tone base colors to block out their painting and then
filling in details with shading and highlights (Figure 6.17). If your digital painting pro-
gram supports realistic paint, or even if you are trying to mimic the look of real media,
try basing your workflow on the rules of the simulated medium.

Figure 6.17
Taking a digital
painting from base
colors to details