Painting styles

I was looking at different painting styles for my comic, and I came across an arts who's painting style I really liked. Their Deviantart username is makochan, and they work with grey scale paintings with a coloured layer set to 'over lay.

This is the process I went through to accomplish a similar affect to their work.

I did a basic sketch of what it was I wanted to paint.

I then worked into the sketch with a grey scale paler to create my painting. 

To make the piece a little more aesthetically pleasing, I added in a background with a light gradient to match the highlights and shadows of the character I had painted.

I roughly coloured over the grey scale painting on a new layer and set it to "overlay". This would make it almost transparent but kept the saturation of the colours, as opposed to altering the layer opacity. 

This is the finished sketch. I don't think I will use this technique in the comic as it is very time consuming and I am not overly fond of the over all affect. I think it's because when working over a grey scale painting, the colours can easily lose their saturations. 

Not only that, but painting itself in photoshop without tools such as the 'oil brush' make it very difficult to paint in. 

I think that if I were to try this again, I would use a different software such as Manga Studio Debut 5.