laivaaja:

Hello there, I’m happy that you trust me and my skills so much that you’d actually ask for advice. It is not bothering it is a great compliment, but also quite a difficult task, because I wish to give you advice that are useful rather than  make your life more difficult.  I hope what you’re asking is also about the digital painting medium, because that’s the format that I currently use. What I say here doesn’t help if you’re using an actual paper, and you should keep in mind that this might be the wrong way to go about it anyways. 😀

I’m self taught in digital art, and I started teaching it to myself  when Youtube did not exist yet and there weren’t tutorials online. Actually the whole internet was still a new thing… 😀 I do almost everything in a strange way / order. This works for me, but I recommend finding your own way to do it and looking for tutorials that support your own artistic methods.

I personally am not that good at drawing outlines and sketches, I’m actually very clumsy at it. I see the image forming out of a gray with lights and shadows that bring the shapes out. That’s why the outlines are often the last thing that I draw.

For curiosity’s sake. This is a random face example of style the that I would use in my comic.  It’s really stupid don’t do this.

I start with a gray rough shape.(1)

Then I use the brush tool in low opacity to paint darker gray on the areas that will be in shadow. (2)

I do the same thing for lighter areas with a lighter color. The low opacity on the brush is the key and the color builds up already leaving nice gradients. (3)

But I don’t like these rough gradients so I smudge them away with a smudge tool. 😀 At this point I usually start adding some outlines. (4)

With the help of these outlines I get the idea where I need more details in shading and highlights. (5)

(6) This part is probably shading at its best. I take a huge burn tool and start to darken everything in with very soft setting (use only with black and white pictures). I repeat the same with the dodge tool lightening some parts of the picture.  I think this is an important part in my art in making everything smooth and more realistic. It is very visible in below the hairline for example.

I’m not sure if this is helpful at all, but that’s the way I do most of this. 🙂

If you ever post your art somewhere I definitely would love to see it.