Hi! I have this tutorial from a while ago about how I shade, I pretty much still do it the same way for most things. Hmm, which backgrounds? only ones I’ve done lately have been for those Dragon Age cards…so I’ll show how I do that! :D

I’ll go through how I go about doing something like this- I use both SAI and PS

First I block out all of the colours, each colour or object has it’s own layer

Next add in lines and extras (sometimes I’ll do this after shading and base it more on how that comes out). I use both a standard brush and a solid rough one.

Then shading! I pick all of the colours out of colours I’ve already used. So the light green will be shaded with dark green, the dark green shaded with brown. The shading is done directly on to each layer, having them split helps spillage!

This generally leaves hard lines unless I’ve used several colours to build up layers. So I’ll blur some of them out a bit.

Now I switch from SAI to PS, here I use levels to fix up the colours (I work on a cintiq up until now, the colours differ greatly from my main monitor colours)

Usually I’ll do this before leveling, here I’ve decided to do it after. Taking one of my watercolour textures and setting the layer style to overlay (the layer is only black! the white is only so you can see it)

The very last thing I do is a little scratchy acrylic texture! this is just applied as a normal layer (here the layer is only white! the black is so you can see it)

And that’s it~ I use methods like this for a few kinds of pictures, so if it’s textured I’ve probably done something like this.

I use a combination of hand made textures and SAI brushes :) these are the brushes I commonly use in SAI for bits that’ll be textured later, I tend to mess around with these settings as I work.

after painting everything I have a set of textures and brushes in PS(this is a small selection of my commonly used ones)

All of these are made from either watercolour, acrylic or marker sheets I’ve made up. I have a tutorial here that covers how to turn them into textures!

and here’s what the progression looks like!

generally I’ll use the textures with their layer type set to Overlay unless I want something sharp, in which case I’ll leave it normal and just colour it.

I’m quite happy to upload whichever design you’d like to either my Red Bubble or Society6 :) just let me know which site you prefer if any, and which design you’d like! (there are 18 cards now so it’d take a while to add them all…)

This goes for virtually any of my work and whatever you’d like to buy it on!…as long as it’s available on either of those two sites XD it also helps if you ask off anon if you make a request! that way I can send links privately and not spam everyone :)

Probably not, but I’m happy to attempt to make a tutorial of some kind for anything! and that could involve something in video form :) if anyone finds something I’ve made and they’d like to know how I did it then feel free to send me a message with a link! next time I do something similar I’ll record myself or take little progress bits.

Oh! thanks for letting me know! I was sure it was somewhere XD hehe

I’ll add that to the post :) thanks again!

No problem, I know exactly what you’re talking about! :) I tend to do this a bunch if I’m either working symmetrically or to help with proportions on opposite limbs. As far as I know you can’t do this in PS, cause you can only flip the whole file and not a single layer.

So you’ve drawn a super amazing arm and want another one! First duplicate the layer, flip it horizontally:

then just move your new arm into place! TA-DA!

If you’re working perfectly symmetrical you can add some blobs in opposite corners, so when you flip it it stays in the right spot!

Hope that helps! :D