how do you colour bro........ your art looks rlly goodd and i always struggle with achieving texture and not messy colours
TYYY
this is mostly how i render than color and its a bit messy so i apologise, I do all my work on Clip Studio Paint but most of this is transferrable
I mainly start with a sketch, sometimes depending on the quality of the sketch I might clean it up by creating a thick solid lineart instead
Base colors, for picking the colors i tend to go warmer and/or darker than the actual colors, details like jewlery, patterns etc, usually don't get colored in here, after that I color my lineart then usually set it to multiply
Base shadows here, sometimes I colorpick this myself but when I'm lazy I tend to set a multiply layer and chose a light purple shade
Rendering, I like to use a hard brush that can layer, I can do very soft paintings but I like how the hard brushes look, this is mostly done by me merging every layer then painting ontop of it
Once that's done I do a mixture of all of this to create more texture, i.e Hatching, where I put some lines usually in the hair or clothing, with both light and dark values
Pencil layer to add texture, sometimes I also use a course brush in my files
And my favourite to add contrast, a lasso tool to select all my darker shadows, airbrush it in with a dark blue, then set the layer opacity down, i dont usually use a blending mode for this but sometimes i set it to overlay, it also looks really nice to alpha lock the layer and turn the edges red especially near the skin
Then post processing! I like to use gradient maps to unify the pallete a bit more, and so that it feels a bit smoother to the eye, if I don't want to use a gradient map I pick one color, then drop the opacity and use an overlay or multiply layer
Next I merge the whole image and create a copy ontop, I use a gaussian blur here to and lower the opacity to create a sort of dream like haze
Then I use the textures Kimono and the Filter Perlin Noise ontop with overlay
of course a lot of texture is from the brushes itself so here are my favourite brushes that I use the most often
Amiette Flat Paint - This is my go to brush, my do it all, I do linework, sketches, coloring, painting, everything with this brush
Artemus Pencil - I usually use the HB setting here and I use it on some sketches but mostly in coloring and just adding texture to my work
Ciro - This is my usual sketch brush, its very nice for creating fast lines and is very fast which suites the way i do my sketches, I use it to paint sometimes but I get annoyed with it fast if i Paint with it
Watercolor Marker - Sadly got deleted, but this is my main brush to add texture to my sketches, the shading in a lot of my sketches is usually from this brush pack
Tsuki_Fude - I had the old copy of this before it was a pack so im not sure how it functions now but this is a majority of my "more effort than usual sketches" i.e the sketches that I tend to post here and on X.
Lastly I have a this timelapse here that show a bit of it, albeit its less structured than what i wrote here haha https://x.com/ssvnrays/status/2005228683595055587?s=20