In this piece, I used a greyscale colourization technique. ‘Colourization technique' is a computer-assisted process of adding colour to a monochrome image or movie. The process typically involves segmenting images into regions and tracking these regions across image sequences. Neither of these tasks can be performed reliably in practice; consequently, colourization requires considerable user intervention and remains a tedious, time-consuming, and expensive task (reference: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~alevin/papers/colorization-siggraph04.pdf). This technique is very useful because it saves time and is a very easy technique since we're only focusing on the shape, not the colours. Firstly,  I always begin by filling in the background layers with a colour. For this piece, I started with this dark grey (Fig.01).


Later, I then start blocking and refining the sketch until it reaches the quality of Fig.02. In certain areas, like the hair and the eyes, I simply painted in a very dark grey.


For the brush strokes, I used the settings detailed in Fig.03, but constantly changed the opacity and flow depending on how I wanted it to look. In the brush tab, the other dynamic, both flow and opacity were set to pen pressure and both were given "jitter” settings of 0.


By the way, you can also use the modes to add highlights by using screen mode, or to add shadows simply use multiply mode with a soft-edge brush. (Fig.04).



In the early stages, I usually start with higher opacity and flow, blocking the shadows and the highlights. After I get everything looking just right, I reduce the opacity and flow to a lower value to achieve smoother grey colours. At this point, I refine the cheeks, nose and neck area a little, and I also add the eyelids and the hair. It's all about refining at this stage (Fig.05).