It seems that even in Arcadia, you walk beside me still.

we're gonna be using my brand new princess man for this

Start with flats, merge sketch and coloring layer together. Background optional but encouraged bc it helps you keep the ambient lighting in mind! Then you're gonna wanna start off with what i call textural shading. idk if that's correct. basically you carve out the shape of the face a bit and lay down your first areas of interest: nose, cheeks, lips, top of ears, eyelids, creases/dimples and neck shadow. it looks stupid light in the screenshot idk why, it's supposed to be a little deeper. but that's up to your preference also

you can just slap the color straight on or do this on one or more soft light layers. Careful: soft light and multiply are both good for shading, but they are NOT interchangeable. Soft light preserves the hue and saturation of the colors it's put over, but that can also be an issue when you want really deep, potent shadows. That's where multiply comes in: but it can wash out your colors because it removes saturation

Next is what i call the hard shadow, again idk if that's the professional term. Here's the stage where you really begin carving out the face. And you do this by basically covering your flats with a multiply layer (of your desired opacity), out of which you erase the parts that are gonna be lightest. I use soft brushes for this to gradually build up the shadow-light transition

Of course, merge layers down as you go

So now! You have your basic shape. From here on we refine by deepening shadows and smoothing out the transitions. But first, let's spruce it up a lil bit

good ol reliable. overlay layer.

I use overlay to subtly alter hues basically. It's also good for adding that ambient backsplash that goes around the outline, wrapping around the shadow

Like truly this is the best way to describe my process. Think metal. Everything is metal. You have really hard shadows right next to really hard highlights, and that's the base you're working with, the texture, the. construction. idfk you Understand

And you apply that philosophy to your colors of choice!

Skin is of course warm and alive and shit, so you gotta give it a sort of plumpness. an oomf. There's a bit of a difference between lighter and darker skin tones - the lighter you go the softer the light-shadow transition becomes, whereas for darker tones you get harder shadows and harder highlights. Skin is pretty damn reflective, is the thing! It's really shiny! But you don't see the shine on light skin because it blends in

and now, that warmer ring you can add to anything, but it's especially effective on skin because it gives it that aforementioned oomf

Thing is, you gotta go through the whole color wheel. Whatever color you're thinking of making something, it's actually gonna be 7 different colors at least. White's gonna be a mix of blues (mid tone), purples/warm blues (shadow), very light oranges and yellows (highlights) and a very slightly blue-tinted grey (ambient backlight)

Anyway back to our overlay

overlay is great. you warm up the edges of your shadowed sections with some reddish orange color, and cool out your mid-sections with some greys, and get some great liveliness

And then from this on it's just a matter of rendering over all the lines, fixing your proportions, adding any more hard shadows if you want the character in a specific environment etc etc etc (which i didn't do here but you'll see the finished piece within the next millennium, i've been stupid busy with work). That's why i render on one layer, helps you carve everything out in one go

One thing that i've always hated about my process is that i very easily get all the colors muddied together. You have Got to resist the urge to add too many in-between tones. While refining, make sure you keep a good degree of contrast between each section, and keep their shapes well-defined. Think geometrically, think in triangles. And resist the urge to blend too much