Hehehe, coincidences are always good~ Yush, i reeeeally love your rendition of her, i definitely will be using your art as a reference for her and hopefully get lots more drawn of her~ And the flower zipper will be required all the time :P

And mneh, bad days happen, but you definitely helped make it less bad! So thank you! :D

Yup, she will continue to be Foxgirl for now, i'm having SUCH a hard time settling on a name for her xD

I saw that you are currently closed for these, so i'll finally give you a rest~ I hope things go well for you irl, and hopefully we can work together again sometime! ^w^

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I'm so happy you like my art of your character!
It literally sets off the bubble machine in my chest XD

Yussss, the flower zipper is a necessity :DDD

Glad I could spread smiles :) I'm like the butter knife on the toast.
Aaa that was a bad example. ignore me, I'm tired, it's late where I am.

Yeah, I'm closed, sadly :C
Actually, with all of the stress added to me irl, I'm not sure when I'll reopen.
It might not be for a very long time aaaaaahahaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Sadness.
This was a good run tho, I feel like it's the longest I've stayed open, compared to my last two art threads.
I'd love to draw more art for you, but unfortunately life's gotten in the way.

pfgdhsjnbhe who needs to go to college, just let me draw!

Anyway.
Always a pleasure doing business with you^^
Hope we can confer in the future :F

Hehehe, i'm glad that it makes you as happy to draw for me as it does for me to receive art from you~ ^w^

I wish you the best in your ventures! If you do ever open up for comms again, do feel free to hit me up! <3

Hey hey Royal!!

I finished DeathWish for ya:



I really like how this turned out, I hope you do too!
DeathWish is precious, thanks for letting me draw 'im^^

WOAH she looks AMAZING XD I LOVE IT. Her head poking down is so badass (idk if you're allowed to curse but WATEVER). Also super jealous of your shading =P

I finally have a free weekend to work on art now :P I'm going to start your piece right now and I'll probs post against when I'm done, thanks!!!!

As promised, here's your beautiful boi!! :3 Had so much fun drawing him! I'd love to draw more of your characters in the future XD

Aaaa so glad you like her!
I tried a more extensive shading style this time, so I'm supper happy you like it :D

Ah he looks great!
Haha, he looks so different in your style, I love it!
Thank you so much!!!

You can draw all my characters buahahahaah

Your welcome and thanks for the compliments XD

Though I'm wondering, how did you learn how to shade so well?

How I learned to shade???

hmm.
I've never thought about it.

A lot of practice, I guess.
It helps to break your subject into blocks. Even though we're drawing in essentially 2D space, it's profitable to try to push your drawings into 3D. I'm terrible at lifelike drawing, or replicating a photo, but studying how light plays on different surfaces is really worth learning. Here, I've compiled a sheet of my process for ya:


This is super simplified, but it shows the shading evolution OK.

1. This is just the ink and the flat colors. I'm color-oriented, so I always begin with colors and add shading over-top of them. I know a lot of artists go the opposite approach: they do a greyscale version of their art first and then add the color over-top of that. I've tried that method and I don't like it as well, but whatever works for you is what's best.

2. Next I begin my shading. I call this stage 'local shading', thanks to my coding background. Basically, I'm adding all of the simple shades here. Up a few paragraphs, I mentioned cutting your subject into blocks? That's essentially what I'm doing in this stage; I'm taking a flat image and trying to give it volume. So anything that's supposed to stick out gets a shadow about it and anything that's indented will get a fill shadow. You can see this at play above the eyes in this example: I've shaded basically the entire aria from the eyes to the brows. That's because our eyes are in a socket, and this part of our skin is in shadow for most light sources.
I'm not really focusing on light direction so much in this stage, but just giving the subject some volume.
Sometimes this gets split into two parts. The second part does deal a bit with light direction and I'll sort of shade the larger, rounded arias with this indication. You can see this above since I've shaded the entire right side of the face (your left), automatically making the light source to the left (your right) and seemingly forward as well.

3. I add the local highlights. Da triangles I love so much^^ This really pushes the light direction. I generally always add a triangle on the cheek for aesthetic reasons :DDDDD

4. I add a greyscale background, dealing mainly with the light direction. This serves as a basis for the rest of the shading process. I generally didn't do this step in my free art since I didn't feel like doing backgrounds.

5. Now I add what I call the global shadow (also due to my programming experience). This is on a layer above the rest of the art and is set on Multiply. It is there primarily to push the main focus first, so that's what your eye instinctively is drawn to. In this case, the face. It also uses the guide of the background to be thicker in more shadowed arias and thinner in lighter arias.

6. I color the background.

7. I add white highlights.

That's basically it. So ya. Lots of practice. I'm not into super realistic painting, but studying profiles of people is the fastest way to improve. Just search the internet or some Stock site and sketch what you see. It doesn't have to be identical to what you see, just focus on where the light is, where the shadow is, etc.

Oh! Another thing, look out for the core shadow.
This will be the darkest part of your shading and is generally not on one side or the other, but somewhere in the 2/3 section of your model. A good way to find the core shadow is to squint, or blur your vision when you look at the reference. This deletes the fancy details that are nice, but can cloud the fundamentals. I'll generally sketch something and then fill in the core shadow first, in blocky representations of what I saw in the blurred image. Then I refine.

But mostly just practice. Real life study is useful for all kinds of art, even cartoony representations XD
Probably not the most wanted advice in the world, but it's what I got.

Hope this helped you in some way!

Another good thing to do is to watch an artist you greatly admire. A lot of them will have recordings of them drawing things, and just watch them (Ever heard of Remarin on DA? Her YouTube is full of speedpaints. She's a great artist so if you don't have anyone I'd recommend watching some of her stuff).
Don't just mindlessly stare at your screen though. Look closely at what they do. What do they do first? What do they do after that? Why did they put that shadow there? What does that shadow do to the overall appearance?
You don't have to think of all of these things, since it can be overwhelming to do haha^^
But watching other artists is a great way to gain subliminal knowledge.

Anyway, if you've read all of this, hope your not totally exhausted and found my extreme ramblings helpful!
I'm here if ya have any questions^^