Part Four: Lights and Shadows

Now comes the fun part! Once you coloured the drawing with flat colours, it is time to give it shadows and highlights to give it some volume. To do this, I usually make a new layer for every area I want to give volume to (e.g:: new layer for the hair, new layer for the skin, new layer for the clothes and so on and on), but if you want to you can work on the same layer you have (e.g: shadow and highlight the hair on the layer you used for the hair before and the same with each area)

For the shadowing, I use these steps:

• choose a lighter/darker colour than the one you are working on
• choose the polygonal lasso
• select the area you want to colour
• choose the paint bucket
• fill the area with the selected colour
• deselect
• choose the smudge tool
• smudge the edges to make them blend in and give the shadowing a softer look

You can always skip the smudging. If you do, you'll get a more anime cell colouring. Also, remember to use both a colour to darken, and a colour to lighten (at least. You can use more if you want to). This gives the drawing a more finished touch, as using only one would make the colouring remain a tad flat.

Repeeaaaaaaaaat the steps with every part of the drawing. This should leave you with a much smoother colouring:

Go to Part Five (and final)