#painting tutorial

First obviously I had to get the sketch down, this was my first pass so the most changes come at this phase, I personally disliked how Umbra was so covered up so i moved a lot of things around and played to get a better layout- This would've been avoided if i did thumbnails lol

Next was the shading, for big complex peices like this i always start in greyscale, I dont zoom in and I use a big brush to get the basic forms down first, focusing on one flat color, then slowly zoom in and add compelxity and deeper shadow

Last I add the lighting, the lighting isnt always last but it's hard for me to do...so i procrastinate lmao, my aim is to make the contrast as nice as possible (I also. work on the background as well with these same steps)

At this point Im unable to make progress in greyscale and need to move onto color. Coloring is my least favorite step besides the background cause its tedius as fuck, theres multiple ways to add color to a grey scale image and theyre all great for different paintings- For this painting I have set colors I need to achieve for umbra, so something as imprecise as a gradient map wouldnt work so what I ended up doing was selecting each. individual. part. that needed a certain color and using tone curve ( I fucking LOVE tone curve) and then using mulitply or hard light layers to get the darkness or brightness I need as well as to get the desired color

multiply layers are needed becase if I only use hardlight or hue shift I wont get the value I need (Everything is the same medium grey mid-tone, but obviously his skull would be MUCH lighter, and Umbras dark green dress would be MUCH darker) So the basic work flow is -> Section off all bits that would be X color (The gold on Mals clothing for example) -> use tone curve to give the gold an orange/yellow hue, while also making the lights warm, the darks cool -> Use layer modes to further tweak the colors -> repeat until theres no more grey

Once everything is colored correctly I now finally get to merge all of my character layers together (My background layers are also merged, but still it's own seperate layer) and render it out, most of the work is done, the main chunk of rendering here is texture and small details, further color editing to make sure my lights are nice and warm and making it clean (and also adding umbras wings....i always forget his fucking wings)

Then the rendering is done and the only thing left to do is small edits! Grain, paper texture if you'd like, i added some blurring to things moving towards the camera etc...

I used to try and paint my backgrounds, aka no lineart straight to colours, but i always hated doing it so I ended up thinking. why dont i just treat my background like im lining+colouring a character. and now it feels way more do-able!

sketch

lineart (I've been trying out using a different more textury/pencil crayon type brush to differentiate it more from my character lineart brush and i think it looks good yay)

flat colours (here the moss/leaves are on diff layer above the trees, and I'll put more layers behind for the middle trees/back-most trees/ground etc.)

Painting! aka shading. yes I still do some painting lol cause i really love the look but for me I found it way easier to paint within the structure of a lined object

colour the lineart; for backgrounds this is usually as simple as making it dark brown, but if it stands out too much (aka is distracting from the characters/main focal point) I'll colour parts of it to make it 'disappear' more

And here's my painting process, which! also goes over how i choose colours for painting:

your lines+flat colours

choose like 3-4 colours to do shading/lighting v roughly with a textury brush, make the colours overlap

Now colour pick as you paint! This gives you a much wider range of colours than the 3-4 you chose in step 2, but its much easier than like handpicking all 17 or whatever of these subtle variations.

I don't quite know how to describe painting any more than that orz so for more painting help look into yt tutorials / do studies to observe how lighting/shading affects an object

Here's a shitty phone recording of me doing step 3 in real time:

My final stage of backgrounds/the entire piece is what i call finishing/final touches. This is for atmosphere and to make every layer feel even more like they're in the same scene.

On a few layers above of almost everything else, I'll go in with an airbrush on whatever blending mode looks nice (usually overlay n multiply) with a "lighting" colour (so in this scene its like sunlight orange-yellow), and brush over areas where light hits most. And then same with a shadow colour (and/or sometimes just a unifying colour e.g. if the background is mostly red i might airbrush a bit with a red cllr if it looks good)

textures! these are ABOVE EVERY OTHER LAYER! I got my textures from CSP assets here . I'll use em with the soft light blending mode and usually turn the opacity down to 30% or lower? to make it p subtle. I usually stick with just 1 texture but this piece i went with more lol just felt like it. I also like to add some colourful noise also at soft light blend mode. (photoshop had an effect that could just Make it but csp doesn't so tbh I made it in photoshop and then exported it and have been using that same colourful noise jpg for my projects since lol n it works. u can download my noise jpg here if u wanna use it)

Also btw it's not that backgrounds without lineart are bad, far far from it, I just didn't have whatever skill possesses those background painters lmao they look so pretty n that's why I had always tried to do the same ;w; But I've managed to figure out a way that works for me and I can still get that painted look in there! So its always good to experiment and see what process works for you C:

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QUESTION 2:

For your second question honestly I'm still kind of in the winging it stage lol; but I did make a small colour tutorial here

I will say about my Violetpaw: She is kind of purple in my design, which I chose specifically because of the 'violet' in her name. Or rather, it's a purplish grey that just looks white in comparison to the dark parts of her fur (which is also just. a really dark purple)

Colour is all about contrast and how it looks darker/lighter/more green/more red etc etc etc. next to another colour!

I try to avoid using pure white/black in my colours Especially for character designs because I think the tint of the "white/black" colours can add to the character's vibe/personality