#soyokaze-step

For pretty much all my layton work I use woodless colour pencils (I believe the brand is koh-i-noor?) that I’ve had forever, but also random pencil crayons if i want specific colours (truly I need to organize them more lol - I sometimes use stumps/smudge tools (those little paper pencils) to help smooth out surfaces on the paper, or honestly just my fingers very gently. Or a light watercolour wash helps to just give the entire image/the background or foreground one toneTake everything I say with a grain of salt because this isn’t like THE way to do it - in fact I’m sure there 100 more easier ways to do this, but this is just how I’ve always worked…  (which has its advantages and disadvantages) 

I do layer colours to get another one! Nothing is really just one colour and it looks really flat to me if you just colour an entire surface with one colour and then one for shading… so for example on the last pic I posted this is how I colour layton’s skin (excuse my crappy phone pics) 

So, basically building up warm (or sometimes cool) tones to have the surface look dynamic and more alive? Yellow undertone, light brown to build skin tone, red to add blood to the face, then dark brown to create the desired skin tone…  I follow a similar pattern for colouring most things - but often I’ll go back and adjust colours all over the drawing as I go so everything looks right next to each other - like my darks are dark and lights are light and shadows are where they need to be

and so on and so forth….then when the pictures done I tweak it digitally because my scanner rips a lot of the saturation out of my colours - I usually exaggerate them a little more too because these images are going to exist online and mostly be seen by people online so I think it’s important to consider that more instead of “does this look EXACTLY like the original drawing”So I scan it and it looks like this:

So adjust it digitally (I just use a free version of Photoscape X for mac and like the basic editing software already installed for final tweaks…) and if I left it looking closest to perhaps what the drawing looks like in real life it’d look like this

but that looks a little flat and lifeless compared to how you can see it in person and see it in different light/up close/without the filter of the computer screen so I adjust temperature, contrast and saturation until it looks good as a piece