#blend modes

What are we talking about? This is your layer panel (this will look a bit different depending on what program you're using) - "clip to layer below" is what we're using

Next to it we'll see a drop down of blending modes - this changes how the layer itself works and interacts with what's below it:

How it works Once we're happy with our drawing we can fill it in - magic wand, lasso, hand painting, it's personal preference, but this is what acts as our base that everything else is bound to (We want something neutral so it it doesn't distort the surrounding colours through colour reletivity - but you can use whatever you want - a bright colour might make it easier to see what you haven't painted yet since it'll peak through any gaps, maybe you want that type of distortion, it's just preference)

We can paint whatever we want on any layer clipped down and won't go out of this box. The most straight forward way to get used to layers is having a drawing with some base colours blocked in and adding a multiply layer over the top clipped down, using a slightly dark and saturated colour and painting in your shadows - we can get a bit more adventurous once we get used to working that way Combining it with folders The folder itself can be clipped - the folder acts like an override and let's us change multiple layer behaviors all at the same time - we can even change the blend mode or have nested folders if we want even more control

Why would be want that? Perhaps the most confusing part is how layers are structured, you'll draw shadows and shading, but put it on a higher layer - things at the top get priority It's an actual stack, we build light and shadows on top - along the way, we can make a layer a bit transparent, or change how it looks with blend modes and combine it with our brushes for more fine tuned control of what we want it to look like specifically

Build it up We don't want to be getting lost, light has so many individual components to it, if we tried to add them all at once, we're going to get a headache So for this workflow we're breaking down light into each of it's named segments - e.g highlights, midtone, core shadow, occlusion shadow We're learning from the Hades style for this piece - so what we're doing is looking for how each of the named parts gets represented and mirroring it in our drawing Prerequisites: this is the 'rendering and polish' stage that gets people's attention, but really we need to first understand light, form, anatomy and poses, etc - if we don't, even if we have the raw colours, we won't know what to do with them - hard to paint a saturated shadow 2 if we don't know what that means - so we practice on learning how to see it by painting simpler objects like fruit first

Mix and match When we have a process workflow, we can replicate it as much as we want - the character itself, the style, etc, all of it is reproducible when we know what we're doing - that's just practice and repetition The trickier part will be combining aspects from multiple styles to make something more personal But for that we're going to need to do this sort of style breakdown through as many different workflows as we can and slowly pick up individual aspects to absorb into our personal way of creating Substitute in anything At this point it doesn't really matter what our working method is - it could be a pencil sketch of architecture, calligraphy bird, paper mache lantern, ceramic bikes, a bowl made of pasta - whatever it is, whatever we're drawn to and can think of - that's us Post processing You can add some final embellishments if you'd want to - final colour tweaks, layers for value variation, signatures etc, doesn't really matter, personal preference Either way, I think all that effort has been worth it