Really great work! Your shading is always really pretty and smooth!

ooh

YAY greyscala shading so much fun to do!! but sadly sometimes it doesnt have the color pop color shading has

Which is why you add those overlay layers ;p

that's cool to see Xeke being made via shade work

Excuse me for a moment while I bug your brains out. So when you shade, you shade in greyscale, on the same layer as the original grey, right? And I know you said you didn't really have any formula for step five, but I was wondering if you have any kind of tips for how to pick the colors you use in it? Like, are they just variations of the main color?

This is super interesting and helpful, so thanks for the tutorial!

Yup, I lock the transparency and shade on the grey layer. For colors, if it's something with a not important background I'd use colors relating to the character. I used red tones in the above image. For other ones though, if it has an important background I'd select colors and tones from there. So you may end up having a more saturated image (color wise) with deep blues for a city at nighttime, or a highly saturated image with bright shades of yellow or orange on a sunny beach day.

Hopefully that helps ;v;

I so need to try this with my next doodle~ ;O;

Thank you so much for the tut~!

yep! one folder. the second folder you see is just for holding the colors.

this may be the best soft shading tutorial i have seen EVER <3

edit the only thing I'd recomment is to not use grey for shading BUT I think with editing and color magic in the end you slap some color on the shading layer.
plain grey shading looks boring as hell but it is easier to layout and craft the shading in a greyscale layer at least for me.

Thank you!

and yeah, in the long run its not the best, but its definitely a great tool for beginners or for more complex shading if you dont want to alter the color layers too much. shading with grey can give you a great grasp on values and shading 8D

are the colors set to overlay?