A lot of people shade with a darker version of the colour being shaded. It’s a common technique for animating, since it means you can slap the character model into any setting and it still looks fine, but for regular illustrations, you should make sure the character looks like they’re in the setting.
I shade using a slightly tinted layer set to multiply.
A lot of people forget about lighting! Including me. Whatever.
A lot of people (including me) tend to forget where the light is by the time the shading stage comes around, so a good way to keep track is to draw the eyeshine during the lineart stage. Or hell, the sketch stage.
To make the light look stronger/more luscious in its rays, you can airbrush veeery lightly over the picture, for both shading and lighting! Its mostly to give the flat colours a gradient effect, but you can also use it to make the lighting all glow-y.
I’m using a character as an example for these, but you can use these techniques on pretty much everything. Like so:
I did this in like 10 minutes, but the basics are there.
Oh, yeah, we should probably talk about light and colour reflection! Are you ready for some SCIENCE????
Colour is created by an object reflecting light. For example, a leaf willabsorb most colours, but it will reflect the colour green. This makes the leaf appear green to our eyes! NEAT.
Now, with this in mind, you can consciously remember a neat fact; reflecting a colour is basically bouncing light back. Therefore, brightly coloured objects will give off light.
In this picture, despite the strong lighting in the opposite direction and the shading set against the wall, the character is still slightly backlit! This is the wall bouncing the colour pink back onto the character’s body.
Understanding how colour reflection works is a huge help with colour theory and painted art, and will help you colour more complicated pieces!
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