Cell-Shade Study 10-23

Disclaimer: I do not own this OC! She's the intellectual property of a guy called Sneedham. 

Production Notes: 

1)For this study I used a mostly neglected method I'm aware of and made a clipping mask to contain my flats to her silhouette. 

To do that you need clean, unbroken lineart, so double check your lines to avoid spotty or semi-transparent lines; then lasso the whole thing; now go to edit then fill; and then make a flats+shading folder with individual folders for all the major aspects of the character's design. Now place the filled in silhouette at the top of the flats+folder; select it and right click; then choose clipping mask; aaaand voila! The mask is set, you can't draw or paint outside of it! Individually lasso and flat color every major aspect of the design until the folder is prepped for rendering. 
2)I chose Rembrandt lighting for her face, which appears to be at a 3/4ths angle, including the little triangle just below the eye socket. I'm not exactly sure if I did the lighting there correctly; I'm not sure if it requires the forehead to be shaded. 
3)The breasts, honestly, took hours just because I kept futzing over them, trying to render more and more semi-realistically; when what I needed, for the shading to cohere, was just a consistent approach. The highlights consisted of a blush layer, an airbrush and a hard brush. Brush-wise, I used a little obscure one in my tool box. Goes by the name 'Kyle's Real Oils'. 
4)For the lips I used a soft air brush for the top and bottom, darkening the former before shaping the lips with an eraser; then adding a soft brush layer for the sub highlight, and a hard brush for the central highlights. 
5)'Kyle's Real Oils', legitimately, might be a decent blend brush. More time needs to be spent checking it out, but, what I've seen for the hair seems like quality stuff. 
5)I had to toggle the hair, bc the original OC had black hair that, when highlighted in earnest, tended toward the tragically geriatric, dust bunny greys and ashen blacks. Altering the hair from black to a dark blue fixed the problem. Mostly. I still had to set the layer's blend mode to Multiply. Similarly, I had to toggle the hell out of the skin, and then finally set the layer to Lighten. 
6)The hardest part of doing the abs, in all honestly, was just not being a precious bitch baby about it and just start shading. Allowing myself to fail and try, try, TRY again is excruciating (because I have a crippling fear of failure), but failure is, inevitably, the first step to success, but every time I schedule anything involving drawing or writing I'm like James Brown standing in front of a hot tub; I just dance around, gassing myself up just so I can keep stalling. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAJnpa…

 Some basic things to remember when rendering abs: big boobs over shadow the topmost abdominal pair, and sometimes the second highest pair. Generally speaking the abs, when the subject's thin or fit, right above the naval have the deepest shadows because the abs slope inwards from the rib cage down. The abs below the naval tend to have the lightest shadows because those abs hang farther out, catching more light. 

7)I did my usual bit. I lassoed the areas I wanted extra shadows on; turning on the airbrush; turning on the hand sensitivity; cranking the opacity between 25 to 50%; and using a color that's the base color, darkened, with, when it's rendering skin, red added to it. (It's a flawed work flow, but it functions better when I don't, oh, for instance, never paint anything for months!) That tends to make me clumsy and indecisive and take 8 hours to do, at best, a color job that should have taken 4 at max. That tends to happen. 

 Final thoughts: All in all I'd say it's a healthy step forward. As studies go it doesn't have nearly the insane rendering of others I've done, but, tbf, those deviated from the assignment, to cell-shade almost exclusively. Instead I went ham and started piling on little touches that weren't necessary, just art hacks I'd studied casually online. (I honestly couldn't say what tutorials I was pulling from, probably just random shorts on youtube or tik tok.) 
 I think I'm getting better at my high lights. At the very least I'm getting less shit-scared to even paint them.