1) Choose a character to sketch
I chose a cool character by my friend daydreamkazooma at twitter. I kinda wanted to give him a flamboyant pose for some reason.
2) Let’s skip line art phase for now and add the base colours
Do not worry too much about what colours to use. Just fill in a general colour and use Hue/Saturation adjustment if you’re not happy.
Try to imagine what the final piece will look like in terms of how the colours will help direct the viewers eyes. In this example, the way the yellow attacks your
eyes immediately brings your view to his jacket.
3) Picking a colour to use for the shading
Now for the shading. Imagine how the object looks in 3D so you can properly show off shapes. Also notice how I flick my pen to create some of the hair shapes.
To choose the colour for shading:
Use the eyedropper tool to select your base colour. (Pic on the top right)
Slide the adjuster on the colour wheel downwards, just a little bit. Then click a colour going towards the lower right on the “colour box” for that perf dark hue. (Pic on the bottom right)
4) Keep going with your shading, always keeping the shapes in mind
e.g.) spiky hair = spiky, triangular shades
The whites of his eyes are so bright its getting creepy, so let’s pick a darker value that’s more pleasant to the eyes and use it for shading the teeth too.
I also changed the colour of his tongue.
5) Follow the folds and shade accordingly
Take note of the type of fabric and the weight of the clothes. This is difficult to explain without going into too much detail, but in general, the thicker/heavier a fabric is, the less folds it has. Your jeans tend to have less folds compared to your cotton shirt.
The McDonald’s red and yellow is starting to bother me at this point so I hid the yellows, and used Ctrl + U (Hue/Saturation adjustment window) to find a darker redviolet for his jacket which I think is a good shading colour for red hues.
Before that, I darkened the (too) bright yellows so it’s not jarring against his jacket.
Add the base colour on top of the shading. You do this by thinking of the LIGHTING instead. I personally do this method more; the other method being: painting with the SHADOWS/SHADING in mind.
Use a bright yellow to light his jacket’s lining.
Also, notice his red gloves are blending in too much against his dark jacket… so what do we do?
A bright colour of course! Make those gloves pop.
Extra details: The white pattern on his shirt and trousers.
OK, let’s give him an eye colour that can “compete” with the eye catching yellows in his jacket. We want to bring attention to his face as well.
The viewer’s eyes are now focusing on his intense eyes before his stylish jacket. We successfully changed the focal point back to his face, don’t you think?
Notice how the shade colour I chose goes towards the left,
(towards desaturation)
Unlike the previous shade choices which were towards the right (towards saturation) For example on his hair:
This is to sort of ‘balance’ the tones. Saturated hues are generally hard to handle so be careful with them. If you choose a saturated tone for shading when your base colour is also a bright tone like a saturated orange, it can end up looking like its been coloured in MS Paint, like so:
When I coloured the yellows on his jacket in a previous step, I did this too.
I switched to Photoshop so my colour wheel is now a… colour box.(?)
Towards-the-left on the colour wheel is Downwards on the colour box.
10) Now for the pre-rendering stage.
Select the shaded areas using the Magic Wand Tool. It’s OK if it feels messy.
Then, using the same method of choosing your shade colour, (again, choose downwards the “colour box”, towards the saturated hues) choose a shade darker than your Shade colour for a deeper shade colour.
Using a soft round brush with pen pressure turned off, carefully paint on the edges of his hair. Just the edges please, you don’t want to replace your original shading colour with the darker tone.
Now Invert Selection in Select > Inverse and paint the area near the shadows with the Highlight tone so you make that nice contrast effect.
Highlights tend to go towards the desaturated areas (to the left)
Do the same for the jacket:
I dabbed this same yellow Highlight colour lightly on his black shirt serving as its
Highlights instead of choosing a lighter tone from the black base.
I find a saturated splash of colour on a black surface much more cool looking.
Do it again for the skin.
I said ‘Highlight’ on that pic on the right, but that’s not really the actual highlight colour. It’s a secondary colour to add hues to the skin so the character looks more alive, kinda like blush-on in makeup. The concept is, skin is translucent so you should tend to show the blood/haemoglobin underneath. For this character’s skin tone, I chose a more orange hue (slightly more saturated orange VS. the base orange) so it goes well with the rest of the colours.
12) Highlights on the face
Now for the real “highlight”. Just lightly dab with the soft round brush the side of the face where the most light hits. Add a little more orange hue if you want, to keep that gradation effect.
13) Finished establishing the colours!
Now just clean it up a little…
…add lineart on the edges and you have a finished cel-shaded piece! Next step would be rendering it if you want to push further.
Do the rest of the fucking owl.
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Thanks for viewing! Kayl belongs to daydreamkazooma.
This is only a cel-shade tutorial but the tutorial to render the rest of the fucking owl is available in my patreon. Brushes used will also be available!
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