Cre's Sai Tutorials

[Cremuex Levier]

POST FOUR: Shading

  Spoiler: images are always big and chunky. 

If you're going to make an image smaller you should consider how the image is going to look when it's smaller, you lose a lot of detail unfortunately. I learnt this the hard way from making pets at DNAdopts.com . We shade in as if the light source was BEHIND the pet, so basically we colour in the middle. This technique can be used for the lighting as well.

I make a new folder to put all the shading in, because it can get messy if too much is going on.



The above image is coloured in with black, but since it's opacity 56 instead of 100 it looks a lot lighter. The opacity is good to fiddle around with because the shadows look more or less pronounced based on the colours underneath. Heck, you can even make a clipping layer on this one to change the colours to work better with the base colours if you want.



You might want to do more then one layer, for added depth. Below is a comparison for how I started doing them (shading according to the big picture) in respect to this shading technique (shading with a larger colour difference for the smaller image). Hopefully you can see which ones look better.