Quick Exercise in Painting and Hard Light Mode

People ask me a lot about how I work, and one of the things that I use thats a bit uncommon is a heavy amount of painting with brushes in hardlight mode. To set your brush to be hardlight in photoshop, just have one of the brush tools active and drop down the blending modes menu and select it.

Hard light works in a way thats hard to describe and its really something you have to play with to get the hang of. Darker colors will multiply on top of your original color, all the way to black, where light colors will add to each other all the way to white. Mid-value colors tend to saturate the existing color with the hue of the color your painting with. The bottom examples show some of what I am talking about, and I'd also recommend playing around with it to really see what I mean.

color selection painted on a green background in normal mode ^

same background, the colors are painted in hard light mode ^

you can see that the darker colors ( 1, 2, 5) go all the way to black, and the lighter colors (6, 7) go to white if painted on top of itself enough. 1 was the least saturated and darkest so it shaded to black the quickest. 5 was slightly lighter but was more saturated, and its reflectd in how it goes down in hardlight mode. You can see 6 and 7 the 2 lightest colors layered up to white easily. colors that where more middle of the road (3, 4) as far as being dark or light and have some saturation tend to just add their own color and saturation to the existing one, which is visible in 3 to a severe degree, and in 4 more subtly. Explaining how it works is kind of tough so its best to try it out for yourself.

using only these colors-
- I've done a quick example on making something using hard light mode.

The first thing I did was to put down some basic color using the mid and darker tones.

Next I smudged these colors to smooth things out a bit and start getting an idea of form.

After doing that I've layed down some more darks. I usually work this way, doing most of the dark shading and then doing the highlights

At this point I'm starting to get things a bit lighter by adding in some of the light yellow color.

Once I've gotten a bit down, I'll smudge it in again.

Slowly working this up by repeating the step of laying down some more of the light yellow.

After smudging that in again, I've added some of the light blue color for some of the strong specular highlights and back lighting.

This is the last of it, I've taken the purple color and used it to get some veiny looking parts as well as continuing with the light blue color for specular highlights. I've used the other colors quite a bit in small amounts on this stage. This is mostly to add detail and keep more slight color changes in the image as well.

There you have it, Total time spent painting was under 15 minutes.