hello! ive been looking through your art and stuff and ive realised that you have this amazing way of shading (esp for clothes) that somehow makes everything look more 3d/pop out more but is very subtle. as someone who has a (relatively) simpler art style who can't go all out with the realistic shading and things like that - how do you do it?
Man I hate taking so long to answer asks that my art style changes BAHAHAHA
how long i took to get this ask aside, WAHHH IM GLAD U THINK SO HIGHLY OF MY ART... THAT REALLY DOES MEAN A LOT TO ME- i’ll try my best to explain how i go about coloring line artwork with an art piece of miss qatar, and hopefully it makes sense!
I’m a bit of a lazy bastard, so when I’m not looking to fully render my artwork in a style similar to my Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania painting, I tend to outline the shadows to make it easier on myself haha (altho it does require u to have a half decent knowledge of clothing folds so like how much easier it is... is debatable) After lining, I fill in base colors.
Then, I loosely color in areas of shadows and highlights- don’t worry about making this nice and clean, this is just about making sure you get the relative values down and that the lighting is accurate.
Once I’m done with that, I start rendering the shadows and colors in detail, giving it a lot more variation. I like to change the hue of the base color in the shades to make it more interesting, and one of my favorite techniques is to ring some shadows with a warmer, redder surround line to make it pop out!
When I’m done rendering the shadows, I duplicate the layer and using curves, manipulate the contrast to go higher, before using “Gradient Map” to choose a gradient map I like, then messing around with opacity and layer settings until I’m satisfied with the colors- this isn’t necessary, but I do it cuz I like the color variation it gives hehe
(Sorry if these images are a bit crunchy I used the timelapse to go back and take screenshots bahaha)
I mess around with the colors a bit more, making it warmer and more saturated (I find my ipad’s colors are wayyy more saturated than other screens so I usually edit in post to make up for it sdjfjsd) as well as tweaking colors here there- for example, I made the folds on the right shoulder a bit darker because I felt that the lighter colors were taking away too much attention from Qatar’s face and the left hand side. And then I’m done! Hope that helps anon!!
