How do you do lights and shading? What color(s) do you use?
Strongly depends on the situation!
As a general rule of thumb, the color of a shadow looks like the inverse of the color of the light source casting it. The shadow of snow under orange streetlights is a bluish-purple, the shadow cast by ambient blue sky is a simple tan, etc. However, you can play with this for various artistic effects.
Under generally well-lit conditions where shadows are more of a stylistic obligation than a strong presence, I use only one shading layer and cell-shade with an appropriate color, usually a relatively pale and desaturated one.
This is because if we shade with a very saturated or very dark color, things start looking a bit intense and weird.
There are very few circumstances where this will look right for the context of the scene, especially with no broader visible influence from the light source. Anything casting a shadow like that would also be changing the color of the highlighted sections - but we'll get there.
In overall darker situations I often add a second shading layer on top of the cell-shaded one - a blanket fill layer that darkens the entire scene by an appropriate shade. Then, to add texture, I sometimes go in and softly erase it around highlighted areas. This blanket fill layer actually looks fine even if it IS highly saturated or dark - as long as it matches the environment the character is in.
The first kind of indicates a dark scene, perhaps under moonlight, while the second's warm lighting indicates a dark area illuminated by something reddish, like fire.
Now if we really want to lean in on that, we can add an Add (Glow) layer that fills the inverse of the cell-shaded Multiply layer to highlight the implied light source that is casting this shadow in the first place. This is how we can make those crazy colored shading effects look actually kind of okay and correct for the scene.
This paints the character with both light AND shadow and thus helps ground the character in their surroundings. Here we see some of the benefits of breaking the "shadow as inverse of light" rule - while the left instance follows it pretty closely and produces some very vivid colors, the middle one shades AND highlights with the same hue, producing an effect that implies the character is in a very hot or fiery environment that's tinting the whole scene red, and the right uses different but cool-toned shades for both, producing an ethereal moonlight or underwater-like quality.
Just for fun I went back, selected a few panels from visually interesting pages and hid the color layer folder so the figures were blank white to show what colors the shadows were. It's a lot of blues and purples, mostly - good contrasting colors to orange, yellow and green light sources.
This is a very shiny comic.
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
tangentwithtanner
andulkaphoto
kaledo-art
dededos
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
