I straight up just stopped doing line art all together cuz I hated it so much and now I do lineless. My advice for shading is to just observe how light interacts with everything in real life. Do some tutorials, look up light effects to really spice up your shading like ambient occlusion and refraction/reflection from the environment onto your character. I use clipping masks and have a multiply layer for shading, and usually overlay for highlights but sometimes I add color dodge but I recommended just using overlay for now if you aren't already. One more thing, learning anatomy actually improves your shading since you know how the light interacts on certain body parts. I hope this helps and sorry for all the yapping heh.

I've tried lineless before, but it didn't really suit my style? ig... the way you do it looks cool, but i totally can't make it work >_<
Since most of my art is just characters floating in a transparent void or with some minimal basic background, i can't really do much fancy light stuff since there are no surfaces for the light to bounce off of. I've tried recently to add some airbrush lighter color in the deeper places of the shadows and it does look pretty good, tho. It might not show but i've been taking art classes with hopes of getting into art uni next year, so i want to think that i know how light and anatomy works on some level.
Overlay is the goat ong🔥 i use it for both highlights and shadows and have for ages now, shit's magic.
I think the reason for my current dissatisfaction is how i go about applying the shadows. Maybe i'll try blending it next time🤔
Don't worry about the yap, at all! Long comments>>