Love the palette of this fella! And the shimmering scales details are just *chef kiss*

Thank you! I'm always looking for more ways to give her scales a more fish-like glimmer. Very happy this paid off!

Did you directly paint the scales or used some PS filter? I still struggle with choosing colors and I would have never thought about making them green-ish like that

The break down of my process with scales kinda works like this: The first thing I do is consider the material quality of the scale, I know her scales are based on fish scales so I can count on finding references to give me more information. The big thing is that The scales have a reflective surface so will kind of bounce the color of the environment some. I'm sure there is more technical way to word that. Anywho, I considered that she was pretty immersed in a wave which would tint the light creating the highlights blueish/greenish and I think I even color picked from a light color of the wave itself and after painting in some clusters of scales where I thought the light was hitting to kind of better "set" them into the yellow I played with blending modes of the layer since just the greenish/blueish was a little TOO "there" if that makes sense .

A lot of what I do depends on opacity levels in my brush and blending modes to get certain effects, but I don't have a set process. I have a general idea how to get in the ball park and make adjustments where necessary and experiment, especially on personal pieces like this.

Generally no matter how you approach it, tool-wise, the biggest asset you can give yourself is understanding how light effects colors and how light kind of works in general because anything shiny is going to be very effected by the environment it's in. I know there are definitely people out there better at seeing those things than I, but it greatly improved how I thought about/worked with shadow and highlights when I started understanding how that stuff kind of works.

And if your program has blending modes at all, you should check them out! they are super useful for a lot of different things!

That's probably way more than I needed to say and sorry if went over anything you already knew! XD I could probably go on and on, it's the teacher in me!

Thank you so much for the infodump!! It's always interesting to hear out other artists ^0^
I'm currently /trying/ to study colors and how the environment influences objects but it's hardddd- and I'd definitely should look up for more references lol
I'm also checking out the blending modes stuff! But for now I'm still stuck at the "Oh this one makes colors COOL" phase

Yeah, but honestly that's a good place to start. It's really good to understand those things but it's also good to remember not to abandon the "this LOOKS cool" intuition XD it's a balancing act really lol. I learned a lot more by watching over-paint critiques of works (all were submitted by the artists for that purpose). People like Boro Dante have some up on YouTube that sort of exemplify the application of the knowledge. But your doing great work! So your well on your way to getting where your going ! Keep it up!