Blending Colors to Paint

[JackAttack]

Hi, I use Gimp to do digital painting with my Intuos Draw. When I start coloring a drawing, I begin by laying down a base color, then adding the darkest spots, then I usually manually choose a color in between the base and my dark color to make the transition realistic. Is there a simpler way to do this? A tool from a plugin maybe?
Thanks in advance

[Ofnuts]

What is your problem? "Computing" the accurate intermediate color? That intermediate color could be obtained by having a partially transparent layer painted with the dark color above the base color.

[rich2005]

Another way.
The problem with Gimp is AFAIK it does not color-pick outside the Gimp environment.

I can not recall a plugin that allows that, or one that brings up a useful dialog.

You could try a small layer, filled with a FG-BG gradient and color-pick off that. Small so it is movable and of course hide-able. The only snag is moving between layers which might break your work flow. That can be assigned to keyboard shortcuts where up/down layers are unassigned by default.

   

Edit:

The documentation does say that the color picker will work outside the gimp window but looks like not the color pick tool you get in the toolbox.

A variation on the 'floating layer' An image with the required colours open in some external image viewer application. The one here is a linux Viewnior. (I see you use linux, plenty of small applications to choose from) With the Gimp dialog 'colors' open, the color-picker that comes with that will select from the external image.

   

[Ofnuts]

(04-29-2017, 07:47 AM)rich2005 Wrote: The documentation does say that the color picker will work outside the gimp window but looks like not the color pick tool you get in the toolbox.

AFAIK it never worked on Windows, only on Linux. Can't make it work in current version, though. But the current doc says: The Color Picker Tool is used to select a color on any image opened on your screen. And for me this implicitly means "opened in Gimp", otherwise the picker would be able to pick any pixel on the screen, whether it belongs to an image or not.

[rich2005]

(04-29-2017, 07:58 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: AFAIK it never worked on Windows, only on Linux. Can't make it work in current version...

Yep, Windows users lose out again. I suppose if colour picking between complex images, rather than swap between tabs, returning to the old multi window mode might be the way to go.

[JackAttack]

Thanks for the idea Rich2005, hadn't thought of that before, I will be trying that shortly.