royi

i try to keep my lineart loose but i pay attention to the outlines so i can quickly select the outer parts, invert the selection and fill it with the bucket tool. my base colors are all 100% opaque and i don't use any fancy brushes here.

as to how i pick colors, i never use the color picker tool, i eyeball everything. that's important for me because i tend to make all of them warmer: the greens are dark yellows, the pinks are light reds, and everything that's close to blue is very desaturated. i do this even for drawings that turn out much different later, unless i have a very specific vibe in mind from the beginning. i also never use pure whites for anything, and if something is black i make it part of the lineart.

then i always color my lineart!! there's no trick to that, the layer is in normal mode and i just paint it with a darker color than what's below it. i usually add the shadows and highlights at this stage of the drawing too. you're going to kill me for this but shade with gray set in color burn or linear burn (never multiply). i just don't want to think about color variety at this stage because it makes things more difficult for later. sometimes i add textures and some basic color correction here (curves, color balance, layers set in overlay, etc.) but i mostly leave that for the next part.

as to how i choose blush colors, i usually pick the base color and move it towards the saturated end of the color wheel, and a bit more pink. sometimes i add a multiply layer and airbrush hot red over the base colors at low opacity. coloring the lineart with hot colors surrounding the blush areas helps a lot too :)

i also almost always duplicate the lineart, blur it and set it in linear burn (i paint this layer in a light gray). this adds a lot of depth to the drawing, especially if later combined with the bloom effect.

the key to why the colors in my art pop so much is that i don't enjoy drawing as much as i enjoy postprocessing pictures 😂🤣😅👌✌️👍 once i'm satisfied with the "base" colors i merge everything except the background, open a new canvas and go crazy with filters and textures. that's why i use ibispaint X even if i do the lineart elsewhere (krita), and even if it works a bit wonky with big canvases.

i do something different for each drawing here, so first i'm going to explain my reasoning so that you understand my process: i used to have a problem of using very strong colors that overshadowed my beloved lineart into which i had put a lot of effort, so my goal nowadays is to make everything look less contrasted without losing the visual impact of saturated colors. that way the lineart remains a strong point and not just a way to separate one color from another.

what i usually do is duplicate the new merged layer, set it to exclusion mode, add a gradient map and play with the opacity. then i duplicate that and do the same thing with another gradient or another blending mode. i tend to add like 3-6 layers of bullshit over my drawings, including textures and other filters like "bloom" or "sharpen". i understand everything that's going on there but i don't think too deeply about it, i just pick whatever looks best.

for the final touches i always pull up the saturation and contrast (since a lot of it gets lost in the process), and i usually have to manually change some colors (ibispaint X has a filter to do that) or tweak the curves. then i add chromatic aberration, noise set to overlay and little polka dots set to linear dodge.

here are some comparisons of the before and after of recent drawings. the 1st one is very subtle, but you can clearly see how much warmth and depth it gains it gets after all the postprocessing. the 2nd one is so different that i understand why you're curious about how i pick colors. i don't think i can replicate that look just from picking nice colors, there's a lot more going on!! the 3rd one personally feels like it had potential lost (i liked the yellow highlights), but the colors were too strong and all over the place, so the finished result looks more intimate and calm and i like it a lot more.