Blending modes! The power-tools of digital art. Using modes like multiply and screen, you can accelerate your shading skills while still having full control over the final result. But there’s way more blending modes out there: let’s look at some more that can help us out.
Hey again! Kanjon here, continuing on the Digital Dabbles series to help you with your digital art skills. Check out the full playlist below, and find tons more art and motivation advice on my channel. You can get something out of it even if you’ve “never” picked up a pencil before.
Right! So it’s time to look at the background today. I’m going to bring up the reference image again from waaay back at the beginning of this series. We’re going to start simple to give us some visual cues of what might look nice, before actually filling them out. This is commonly known as “blocking in”. I’m going to actually blur the reference a bit to help make this easier, and with a simple soft brush, make some of the same colors. Not going to care about lighting or even accuracy, but I am going to put the clouds, trees, and grass on their own layers. Easy enough, that’ll do. This just helps us lay down the vibes of the scene, and we can fix it up later. Let’s work on the grass.
I’m actually going to use a pre-made brush pack to help here. You’ll find this in the description – check it out! Never need custom brushes, but here, it’s nice to quickly stamp down some grass shapes without needing to patiently paint each blade.
I’m going to sample a few of these and very messily slap some down. If I’m too precise about this, my painting will actually look like it has too much detail, so I’ll use this excuse to be a little sloppy. What will really bring this to life is to vary the colors a little bit. And maybe add some shadows and highlights with Multiply and Screen! But hey, there’s this fancy new blending mode called Overlay that’s supposedly a combination of those two –
Woah there! Overlay is one of the most confusing blending modes out there, let’s step back little a bit.
Unfortunately there’s a lot of bad information out there about what Overlay actually does: while it is a combination of Multiply and Screen, it does not work how you’d expect if you want to both highlight and shade your painting. I see artists keep repeating Overlay as some ultimate shading tool when it actually isn’t that, at all. It is still super useful, but not entirely for direct shading. Here’s how it works. If your color is brighter than the halfway mark here, it screens. Darker than that, and it multiplies. Wait… that sounds like shading. Why’s that wrong? …Did you catch what I did there? Vote with your phones now!
So I left something out of that explanation: I said “if ‘your color’ is brighter”. What is “your color”, is it the brush color? With overlay, it’s not! It’s actually the color of what you’re painting on. Why does this matter? Am I just being pedantic? No – this is actually the thing that can really frustrate you with Overlay, and make you think that it’s broken! This actually means that if you’re painting on a subject that is already pretty dark, or too bright, it does almost nothing to it. In fact, Overlay does nothing at all on a pure white or black layer!
Lemme show ya. I made two copies of this fox, and I’m just going to scribble Overlay colors on top. Both of them barely change, because the bright fox will always screen, and the dark one always multiplies. If you actually want to use both Multiply and Screen on one layer, you use the Hard Light mode. Despite the completely different name, it’s Overlay’s cousin: It screens with light colors, multiplies with dark colors, BUT it actually uses your brush color to decide between screen and multiply – that’s what you want! You might find that hard light at full opacity is a little strong though; try keeping your color choices sorta towards the middle third, or turn your opacity down a lot.
Confused yet? You might be. I show you this so that you don’t feel like you did something wrong on your own. If you think this is too much and you just want to use Multiply and Screen on their own, that’s perfectly fine! I do that. I think it’s easier to organize.
ANYWAY! Let’s do stuff and make this grass a little more interesting. I am actually going to use Overlay here because what it DOES do is it lets us mess with the contrast. I’m not specifically trying to highlight and shadow things, I just want some color variety, and Overlay is perfect for that. It’s a contrast tool; it won’t give us shaded results like with Multiply and Screen but it does look interesting, and sometimes that’s what you want. Using some of the same grass brushes, I’m just going to mash some different colors in on this Overlay layer, and they’re going to tint and change the base grass layer in a nice chaotic way. I said I’m going to be messy, but I also find this kinda relaxing, and sometimes it’s fun to spend a bunch of time and just see how the colors interact. Try to change the size of your brush here and there, both for variety, and because the farther away blades will be smaller.
Hey hey! Now we’ve got something. Notice how our shadows from before are still interacting with the grass in a cool way. You try this out too! You can use an Overlay layer like I did, or Hard Light if you want to emphasize light and shadow more, or… you can even pick a random blending mode and see if you get a cool effect! Even if you don’t know what all of the modes do, you’ll probably find something cool in the list.
Up next, we’ll work on the clouds and trees, maybe try a couple more blending modes for fun, then refine and finish up this painting! If you want to share your progress so far, please do tag me! I love to see it. Let loose and experiment with your paintings and sketches and chase that passion.
| Production Info | |
|---|---|
| Music | sero - Blooming Succulents; sero - Deja Vu; idokay - What Floor |
| VRChat World | Sea Breeze by WispyWoo |
| VRChat Avatar | Vulper by Royalty, Meaty, and Reval |