The shading on the center looks good, really brings out the texture of his fur.

The center one is actually an awful mistake; I ended up using ash grey for the highlight color of the belly and it looked waaay to dark, so I tried to see if it'd look better lighter (it does) but I did so using a gel pen, and it was at that point I realized I needed much smaller pictures to work as thumbnails

So you just miniaturized the digital inks and thumbnailed them, then? Honestly, even if it was a mistake, I think that it was a positive one; maybe it's because I'm only seeing it as a photo, but that shading seems to add a lot of depth to the portrait. Either way, we both know the finished product looks superb, so kudos!

Personally, I like the ash gray belly. *giggles*

omg how do you do that? D8

Man you did a lot of work on this piece. I applaud your work in the thumbnails.

Beautiful work !

Dayum, this is what I call dedication to your craft. This is such an inspiration to see how much work, love and effort you put into your work.

Whoa. Okay, please PLEASE show assemblies like this of all the variations you do, because... you may not believe it but it never occurred to me that I could do color or other variations on a piece! These are so much awesome to compare, makes me think what you were considering at the time with each one, neat c=

I mean, please show more of them, if you are willing to, oops. :D

This shows all the thumbnails I did; I could explain them if that would help

Ah, I mean, if you do other arts on other subjects with this process, could you show those? :> And heck yah, please explain 'cuz I'd love to learn. :>

Well I went into this not knowing what colors would look the best, so I figured I'd test out a few variations first on smaller paper. That's the first one--which I realized pretty quickly was far too big for a quick study, so I printed out the sheet of nine tiny versions. I blocked out shading in pencil on the first square so I knew where to put my dark patches on the subsequent ones. Then I started some combo of markers for the highlight, midtones and shadows--the first two didn't pan out that well (the highlight was too dull) so on the fourth I decided to move the midtone to the highlight color (Goldenrod was the color, MVP of this picture) and make the shadow much darker. Then I blocked out various colors for other parts of the picture--I wasn't very sure about the wall, so I quickly did up another combo for the back wall in the fifth picture and quickly laid out the other colors I'd already decided on to make sure they matched (and the back wall didn't blend in too much with the other colors)

Aw spiff, thank you :3 This all is a great ref and learning in itself, how fascinating.

That's a great process! Sometimes if I get stumped on color choices I'll photograph the work, do a digital mockup in Photoshop then finish out traditionally.
I love this piece it's handsomely adorable!

I want to sell it!!