It’s really just a form of cell shading, only with a soft edge to it rather than a hard one.
Plenty of professional things use a soft airbrush shading (Disney in particular is a good example of it). It’s far more time-consuming than cell shading, and can be difficult to get ‘right’. These do take some time and practice to master.Īll of the shading here is hatching with the pen, and a little tone change in the grass.
There are techniques that use solid blacks for the shading, such as those that resemble pen and ink drawings. Note! This advice assumes that your shading is as a multiply layer over the flats. (I’m aware my blue-grey looks pretty close to the black example and I apologize)Ī bluish overlay layer over everything can also sell the ‘night time’ look (and saves time on picking out a proper night time palette).
In the example above, the red shading enriches the character’s skin and hair, but looks a little too dark on his green vest since the colors are complementary. The underlying color of the object plays a part, too. Warm light sources (that is, light sources in the red-orange-yellow range) tend to give you warm shadows, while cool environments (blue-purple) give you cool shadows. I tend to favor a purple for daytime settings and a grey-blue for nighttime. It’s not wrong, technically, but using some other color can make your drawing pop a lot more. The reason you see this ‘do not’ all the time is that using pure black for your shadows tends to flatten and wash out your colors. Shadows are dark, and adding black to things makes them darker, so it makes sense to shade with black, right? jpeg files save space, but this file type may compress your art and sacrifice quality.