Cell Shade Practice 11-24

Disclaimer: I do not own this OC, she belongs to Sneedham on DA. I just used her flats to practice my cell-shading/soft-shading. 

The process: 
I slapped down all the flat colors and started adding the overlapping shadows, pushing the values as much as I knew how, adjusting my hues; the darker the shade the more red I added. Even for lighter general shades I would sample the original skin tone, bump the hues juuust a little bit, turn on my airbrush, my hand sensitivity, drop the opacity to 60 or lower, lasso the general area I wanted to shade, and take a gentle swipe with a fat round soft brush. (For shading and highlights, I use the default soft brush for Photoshop, or the default hard brush with the tapered edges.) For clothing I didn't bother adjusting hues (though I should have inverted the colors, using warmer colors for the shadows. To help them contrast more.)

Some general tips about shading (if nothing else than so I remember):
1)Air brush red on the forehead, the nose, cheeks and the chin, the warm spots on the face; then add some heat to the tip and inner ear. 
2)For the juicy lips, make a layer separate from the body; draw some lines for the mouth; and then airbrush a darker color for the top lip and a lighter for the bottom, adding a shadow underneath to make the lips fuller. Now take an eraser, sculpt the cupid bow, airbrush a glossy sub-highlight, then, on a highlight layer (color dodge) add a tiny bright dot. 
3)When shading the abdominal wall a general rule of thumb is, if the abs are sculpted, that the lower abdominal (below the navel) will jut out the most, second only to the abdominals lacing the rib cage. The abs just above the navel will have the darkest shading (comparatively). AVOID blocky cell-shading on the abs! It's fine if you do it, but smudge and blur the fuck out of it! 

 For the highlights on the skin I airbrushed a little red for blush on the flat layer, and then, in a highlight layer above the flat colors, I'd adjust the shade so whatever color was the base would be near white. The highlight layer I set to color dodge or hard light. (Highlights honestly cause me the most grief, because the more soft-shading you add the more the highlight has to blend organically with whatever surface it's on, while simultaneously it has to POP!)  


 For the jewelry, basically, I just sampled the shade on the flat layer for the rings, switched on my airbrush, hand sensitivity, and dialed back the opacity to make a glossy sub-highlight, and then, on the highlight layer, turned all that shit off, put the opacity to max, and popped on a tiny bright highlight. Then I used a smudge brush to dull one side of the highlight and a blur tool to clean up the smudges. 

Since the lighting on her face LOOKS (to me) to be about 3/4th's lit, I added a Rembrandt triangle to highlight her cheek bones. (I don't know for sure if that works with soft lighting from above, but I guessed, based on the tilt of her head, that only half of her face would be fully lit; so the elevated contour of her cheek bone on the darker side of her face would need, at least, some lighting.) 

After I did the highlights, I added a layer to push the shadows more and flipped it to multiply; then another layer on top of that to add semi-occlusion, near black shadows. 

For any noobies just starting out, the arrangement goes like this:

My references (opacity LOW for tracing) to my Flat Color Folder w/ Flat Color Layers to (outside of the flat color folder) my two Shading Layers (overlay/multiply) then my Highlights (color dodge/hard light) then, above aaaall of that, my Lineart (normal). The modes for each layer are in parenthesis. The smudge brush I used is from Marc Brunet's basic set; you can download it for free if you click on one of his youtube videos. (Trust me, go get it, now! It's world's better than the default Photoshop gives you!) 

The #1 piece of advice I would give, to any greenie fresh to the hobby, is, when not expressly in use, LOCK. YOUR. LAYERS! (I have to do this CONSTANTLY, because a glitch in my laptop makes it bounce my selection from one layer to another, for NO reason. It also makes you double click layers sometimes. Again, I have no clue why this is, it just is; it's an old computer.) Unlocking things can be frustrating, I know, but you know what else is frustrating? Finding out you colored all your shit on one layer and can't spam the undo button. When you lock a layer it's Hans from 'Lethal Weapon 2', ('Diplomatic immunity!'); that layer is untouchable, especially to any fuck up you might accidentally impose on it, and parenthetically ALL your hard work.
Trust me. Lock your layers. 



Final Thoughts: 
Well, uh....obviously I didn't do a cell-shading study like I wanted, when I started out; this practice run got completely away from me! Buuut that's not a bad thing, since I got to push myself and try out new things. This ultimately helped me with my anxieties about soft-shading, because I'm abysmal at color theory (lines are more my wheel house), aaand it's good to see that I've progressed since last year, definitely. It gives me more options, which makes me more excited to draw. 


P.S. There're no translucent nipples, so, this study will be viewable, this time, to the general public.