Show me your shading pipeline!

Darth_Biomech 2021-04-19 18:08:04 UTC #1

I'm thinking about restructuring the way I shade my flats, so I want to see how people do it. =D

This is my current structure:

I want to change it since it isn't working great with color theory as it turned out.

thecrystalrook 2021-04-19 19:12:13 UTC #2

uhhh...

That counts, right?

Scarlet_Cryptid 2021-04-19 19:23:25 UTC #3

@thecrystalrook Yay! Someone else who uses markers! I thought I was the only one! I can't do digital art to save my life, but I maaaay have dumped some points/money into my marker collection.

DokiDokiTsuna 2021-04-19 19:50:05 UTC #4

I mean...for me it's basically just the Recolor tool:

But as someone who also struggles with getting blend mode layers to do my bidding, I think I might be able to help if you don't feel you're getting the best results from yours. Although I'd need a little more to go on than just this...

Lady_T_Musings 2021-04-19 20:00:14 UTC #5

Mine looked a lot like yours when I was working in clip studio Darth, but then I switched to iPad for mobility and moved to Procreate and now it looks like this:

Switching to Procreate simplified a lot of my process which took some getting used to, but now I'm honestly pretty happy about it as I can work faster bc of it and it forces me to take chances and commit to decisions since I don't have access to as many layers to fall back on. It was mad scary at first, but I've grown to appreciate the program for helping me be more decisive and keep moving. Procreate be like, "Lady, pick one and delete the others bc you have 3 more panels to do and no space for all these redos." haha.

Also @Scarlet_Cryptid and @thecrystalrook that's baller to see y'all bust out the alcohol markers. I only use mine for illustration pieces, I haven't attempted to use them for making comics.

Darth_Biomech 2021-04-19 20:10:01 UTC #6

Well, it's from this reply-critic. It's hard to get shading to work with the color theory in mind since it's a bit hard to control with layers. But I reluctant to switch to the "paint every shadow color by hand" approach, since it will definitely significantly increase the time I need to spend on the shading.

DokiDokiTsuna 2021-04-19 20:40:46 UTC #7

Hmm...so based on the critique, I feel like the bare minimum you could do to improve your colors is to just change the color of some of those blend mode layers, depending on the scene.

In my experience, dull blue (or dull purple for flesh tones) works pretty well for normal everyday lighting; any situation that doesn't need to look particularly special.
For environmental color (like a fire scene or something) saturated-but-dark colors in the hue in question work well, especially when paired with matching overlays...I mean look at what they did with those three example pages. All they added was overlays and everything immediately looks so much more cohesive...that's a very simple fix right there.

...Although, if you want my opinion, I think your shading is pretty much fine the way it is (way above average, definitely). I think what your critic was noticing there was the color scheming of the characters, which IS a bit mismatched to the environment...but to fix that, it'd be much easier to just redo the character palettes than to try and cover it up with blend mode layers.

Darth_Biomech 2021-04-19 21:24:27 UTC #8

I also was thinking that the issue is that I'm not shading the unshaded parts of the image, as it was mentioned, so white and grey things remain desaturated. So far I've settled on adding another color layer, it feels like it makes things better, though I'm unsure by how much.

Scarlet_Cryptid 2021-04-19 23:39:15 UTC #9

I can back this up -- the color of your shadows can help a lot. 90% of my shadow colors are a specific family of blue/violet/greys. They look great on skin tones and almost anything else with some yellow or orange in it. The only thing they don't quite look good on is very red shades-- I end up skewing my shadows a bit green for those.

My method, which may or may not be helpful to folks considering I'm using markers and not digital, is three layers of color-shading (a light, medium, and dark skin tone, for example), followed by two to three layers of that blue/grey/purple shadow color (a light and a medium, sooooometimes a dark if I want to really push it.) That's what I did here:

EncryptedWriting 2021-04-19 23:41:15 UTC #10

... the flex you have is absolutely infuriating

ogjuic 2021-04-19 23:42:46 UTC #11

this is all I do. I spam lights and darks till I got what I need. It has the base sketch and the lined sketch.

rajillustration 2021-04-20 00:55:19 UTC #12

My shading pipeline is weird and uses a lot of coloring with predetermined masking layers so I made a video of it (disregard the clickbait title, it is fast but it's not like the fastest thing in the world. Yet) but I do it this way so I can do overlay and shading specific to the part of the body and not over the entire body--keeps clashing colors from being an issue.

I also have a file that is...my master key basically. A Huge Mess, but it keeps things consistent.

It's very much a work in progress and there's some things I want to edit out completely, but my project is so long I don't want to go fully tiny palate, because I think I would get bored. So, I do several palates and switch between them depending on how I feel.

rajillustration 2021-04-20 01:34:24 UTC #13

So my painterly side is humming, and I love talking about gray and the magic of the color gray. So forgive me for throwing in some five cents that may help (or may not) but I think the issue is just that gray is hard and deceiving, especially when trying to get it to match with pops of orphaned color spots in your panels. But, gray can totally work here.

Gray has color to it, but it can only appear to have color if it is next to a contrasting gray. I do feel like you already put color into your grays and did think about making a warm gray vs a cool gray--but it's so subtle that it's nearly the same gray.

So like, when I look at your image, I think the issues aren't resolved with a screen layer because you're just moving all the colors in one direction, including the grays that were very similar on the base layer. I think it's the base grays of the bg and their clothes being so similar in midtones that you aren't getting a contrast so they blend together and orphan the brighter colors in their hair and clothes. I'd just stretch further what you already are doing with the contrasting hues in your gray and seeing if it works? Maybe that'll help?

Again feel free to disregard what I'm saying, I might be totally off of what the problem is that you are seeing. Your work does look pretty nice so this is mostly nitpicking.

artamazon 2021-04-20 02:50:05 UTC #14

I typically have one color layer for an object, and I don't use more than one layer unless it's a texture or something that needs a blending option.

migxmeg 2021-04-20 03:06:34 UTC #15

This looks much grosser than it is since a lot of the components don't actually change from panel to panel so I just keep some template folders with all the layers ready to go.

If there's a scene switch I go through and change the colors and opacity on the various glow/multiply/overlay layers until I'm satisfied with them, then that's a new template for the rest of that sequence.

Kaydreamer 2021-04-20 03:21:32 UTC #16

I'm one of those 'shade every colour by hand' types. Multiply and overlay layers are great for some styles, but they can look a little 'artificial' for my tastes, especially since what works over one colour may not work over another. I'm also pretty good with colour theory, and painting is my favourite part of the process, so I'm happy to spend the extra time.

I keep palettes of all my flat colours, with their shadow colour right next to each. That helps quite a bit, I'm not having to constantly colour pick.

I'm trying to speed it up by focusing less on neatness and allowing my shadows to be rougher and more paint-y, but that'll be a long road. At the moment, I tend to over-render a lot.

nostalgicroxas 2021-04-20 03:31:06 UTC #17

Basically I work like this.

If it's more complex, all of the linework layers go into a single "Folder" and all of the coloring goes into a folder underneath
For those who don't know, the red line on the highlight/shadow layers is a "clipping" mechanism built into SAI that makes it so that anything put onto that layer does not go out of bounds of the other layer below it.

ie: layer 8 is the flat color I put down, and layer 14 is the shadows done with an air brush tool in this case, and layer 16 is the higlights
layer 4 above that is a layer that has the white dots on it for the stand alone bright lights on the hair

In that image all you're seeing are the layers for the lineworks and the hair and the heart. The skin is farther down the list.

ninjashira 2021-04-21 00:03:09 UTC #18

It's only this bad when I have anime flashback scenes and contemporary scenes together on the same page, because they're shaded and lit differently. Not shown (because I couldn't get it all into one screenshot) are a few layers above the lineart for color overlays and stuff.

nathanKmcwilliams 2021-04-21 19:52:09 UTC #19

My color shading pipeline literally consists of one multiply layer XD

My monochrome shading pipeline consists of a butt-ton of screentones xD