It's many layers - as many as necessary to make it look right - set to various blending modes and opacities, using subtle coloring (set brush to hard-edged, low flow of 20%ish, then vary the opacity depending on what you're doing. Click the little lock in the Brush Controls palette to keep the brush from reverting to its default settings, if you haven't learned that yet - that was a lifesaver for me XD). There's no one tried-and-true combo, and I have to test each one. That being said, Color, Soft Light, and Hard Light tend to be the ones I use most, with a couple of Multiplies thrown in (at low opacity) for darker areas. But I give other blending modes a try, too - I think I've used Hue once or twice.
After I do the B&W, the next layer is pretty much the base color - it doesn't need to be strong, as other layers will build up as I'm using other colors to make the picture's colors complex. Then I start going in with other tints and shades on different layers to build up the shadows and highlights, adding in cool colors in the shadows and subtle tints of violets and greens and such to make the skin vibrant. Kind of resource-heavy, and the tutorial guy tends to collapse his layers into the greyscale layer once he's built up 5 or so and make new ones, but I'm exploiting my 3 gigs memory. :D
At some point - and that point is always the vague "when it feels right", the layers get collapsed all together and the refining continues right on the color. :) In the tutorial, he doesn't do the hair until this point, but for Matsumoto I did her hair in B&W, the tinted it and collapsed, and then continued working with her hair in color. Not sure how I'll approach Renji.
ETA; And just to emphasize the "subtle" in building up the colors - in the video, you usually can't really tell that the guy is adding colors as he paints, it's just after a few minutes you look back at the previous version and go "Whoa! There's color!" :)
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After I do the B&W, the next layer is pretty much the base color - it doesn't need to be strong, as other layers will build up as I'm using other colors to make the picture's colors complex. Then I start going in with other tints and shades on different layers to build up the shadows and highlights, adding in cool colors in the shadows and subtle tints of violets and greens and such to make the skin vibrant. Kind of resource-heavy, and the tutorial guy tends to collapse his layers into the greyscale layer once he's built up 5 or so and make new ones, but I'm exploiting my 3 gigs memory. :D
At some point - and that point is always the vague "when it feels right", the layers get collapsed all together and the refining continues right on the color. :) In the tutorial, he doesn't do the hair until this point, but for Matsumoto I did her hair in B&W, the tinted it and collapsed, and then continued working with her hair in color. Not sure how I'll approach Renji.
ETA; And just to emphasize the "subtle" in building up the colors - in the video, you usually can't really tell that the guy is adding colors as he paints, it's just after a few minutes you look back at the previous version and go "Whoa! There's color!" :)