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Flats and basic shading. You can see the difference that little bit makes between these two shots.


Flat colours are super easy. Whatever method you want to use, just fill in the blanks, paint by the numbers, whatever you need to do. The one thing I do keep in mind is to have four main layers, about about one grouped layer.
-Scales
--Skin/Markings
-Hair
-Clothing
-Other (this includes mouth, eyes, objects the characters are interacting with)


For shading, what I do is create a grouped layer with each colour layer in photoshop. You create a grouped layer by holding down Control and Alt and hitting "G". This will indent the layer and lock whatever you draw on it with the already filled pixels of the layer that it's grouped onto. In this case, it's so I can shade like crazy and not go outside the lines, while keeping the main flat colours intact.

I set the shading layer to 30%, but you can up that depending on lighting. Its all your own thing here. I pick a purplish tone (can be dark, but it can also be bright) and just paintbucket the whole shading layer and then erase where I think it shouldn't be shaded.

You can also pick other shadow colours, I just tend to stick with purples for most images.


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