A few questions from a newbie

[Mick2006]

I have a lot of learning to do but hopefully I will get the hang of digital art some time soon. Anyway here are a few questions about digi art that I dont know the answers to.
1. What does color blocking mean? I have seen it being mentioned on the tutorials of this website but I cant really find an explanation of what it means and how to do it.
2. What are the difference between channels and layers?
3. And how to I get colors on a digital painting to blend with lighter or darker colors?
Sorry if these questions were answered a million times but I did use the search icon and I still couldnt find the answers to these simple questions.
Thanks in advance

[Gerulaitis]

1. roughtly putting down flat areas of color, just so you have something to work on (because a color's appearance depends on adjacent colors). Simply put - if you were working on a portrait, you might block in only 3 colors at the very start - face, hair and background.

2. channels hold the light/paint components of a picture, for example, if you were working in rgb you'd have 3 channels: Red, Green and Blue (not counting alpha/transparency); if you were working in cmyk, you'd have cyan/magenta/yellow/key(black), if you were working in lab, you'd have luminance/a/b, if you were working with a grayscale image, you'd only have one channel - luminosity, and so on. A channel is always monochrome because it controls one value of something in a picture (amount of red light, amount of yellow paint, amount of opacity, etc.) - if you were to paint in R channel, you'd only effect the red component of the pixels, if you were to paint in the alpha channel, you'd only effect the transparency. Layers are like pictures in their own right - they're comprised of channels.

3. There are several ways:
a) use a blending/blurring tool, like 'just add water' in painter, smudge (not recommended) in photoshop.
b) use a lower opacity brush.
c) pick a color in the middle of the two and slap it down. Maybe combined with a soft edge brush or lower opacity brush.
d) select the area and use the blur filter.

[VincentKlijn]

For #2 I would use these explanations, although bug explained it well:

Channels are masks.

Layers are transparent sheets with content.

[Gerulaitis]

I wouldn't agree with the "channels are masks" idea, though.

Alpha channels are usually synonymous with masks, because alpha controls transparency, but not all channels are alpha channels. I couldn't call the red component of an image a mask. Even if it could be called a "mask for how much red light to let into a pixel" (because it's sort of like alpha - 255 being totaly opague (100%), 0 being totaly transparent (0%), then it couldn't be used in the same sense for cmyk (0 is white, 255 - full color) or lab, where a and b channels control color in a kind of odd way.

[Mick2006]

Thanks for all of your answers and Im sorry to be a pain but can anyone tell me what are flat colors and could someone also explain to me in detail how to color block? (Please understand that Im still new to art)

[Gerulaitis]

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=56806 <---- Step 1 is the blocking in of colors. Maybe step 2 too.

Flat colors are... ugh... flat. Same color, no variation, like the background behind this text.

[Mick2006]

So basicly the first thing you do when making a digital painting is color blocking on the first layer then on the other layers add in the details?

[riceface]

my advice just go buy a beginners book on how to use photoshop in the first place b4 u wanna start doin everything

[Mick2006]

I have been studying Photoshop for quite a while and I am finding this website to be the best place for answers. Most of the books dont explain the digital art secrets.