The Man, The Myth, The Legend

I do all my pieces in procreate! Heres all the brushes I currently use. Except the signature brush (which I made myself with a YouTube tutorial) and the oberon brush (which is in the procreate library by default), all of these are by the wonderful fishspencil! I recommend taking a look at their brush sets, they are all free and it’s been a lot of fun experimenting with different techniques!!

Now, as for the coloring, what I do heavily depends on what I’m trying to draw? And the ambience I want to give it! I don’t color backgrounds the same way I do characters; for the sake of this tutorial tho let’s just say we’re trying to color in a character on a blank canvas! Hyacine will be our test subject for today

What I usually start with, is either the skin tone or blocking out the entire shape with either the skin tone or a light color depending on the outcome I want, so it’s easier to make a palette that is aesthetically pleasing(?)and the colors complement each other! I like using earthy colors for the skin so the palette ends up with a warm hue 🙂‍↕️ I like to pick colors from the leftmost part of the coloring wheel, though I think mixing those with saturated hues create the best results!

For shading, I turn the wheel slightly downwards and color pick a tone below where the base color is:

As I color in the different pieces of the character I like to render each, so the next thing can be nicely on top and I don’t need to use the eraser. Specially when drawing a character that has an established design (i.e any canon character such as Hyacine in our case!) I like to take some liberties with their designs shape wise, but also with the colors! Whatever hue of pink hair fits her skin tone the most, thats what we go with

For the render, I do the same things for every part of the character! I tend to separate hair and clothing items into ‘pieces’, shapes I can color later on with a similar tone to the base color to give the piece some flair! I also like being MESSYYYY on the rendering, adding doodled lines and zigzags, here’s a closeup of the himeko nova piece I posted recently where you can appreciate what I mean with both the doodling and the segmented coloring!:

Lastly, I do a color correction phase! I like to play around with the color sliders and different gradient maps to see what will come out! The first four options under the effects icon in procreate are the ones I like to use the most. After that, I like to draw over the character a bit more to give certain parts of their clothing a messier look :D