Colouring Experimentation!

Hey there,
While I've been on the jobhunt these days, I'm also playing around with some digital painting techniques. I've read about a few, but never had the time to try them myself! Here’s a pretty neat one I tried out recently, if any of you want to give this a shot too!

This technique I tried involves painting your image in gray scale, then adding colours over it.
I first read about this in my Alex Ross artbook. I haven't tried it with traditional mediums like he does, but I did give it a shot in Photoshop and Painter. So much easier for n00bs like me when there is a CTRL+Z!

Here's a screen cap of my work-in-progress gray scale pic:

I started by sketching this out with one of the soft default brushes, alternating between black and white at different opacity settings. It ended up looking like this:

Then, I brought it into Painter X, which is on my PC. I don’t have any WIP screenshots unfortunately, but I pretty much had two layers over my greys picture:

-One set to Overlay

-One beneath it set to Color.

I found Overlay left a lot of the white areas blank, so I used the Color layer to fill in anything that was missing. I don’t normally paint with layers, I use them mostly for texture. That being said, it’s quite possible I’m breaking some kind of secret “Layers rule”, but who cares, it works!
The end result was this, with the texture added in Photoshop:

It’s different from what I usually do in Painter, and I’m really digging the colouring effects.
I’m going try to play around more with this in the future.