Introduction

For more detailed look into the shading assist feature, I recommend taking a peek at my previous guide on this topic. Here’s a link.

Prepare your Drawing

We’re following a similar layout when it comes to folder management of a finished flat color drawing. Please preview the image above, I have titled all the layers to explain what is what.

 

Layer Hierarchy

The majority layers of the completed drawing as a whole should exist inside a folder, because shading assist ‘‘reads’’ the folder content in its entirety to give me the output I want. These are the layers relevant to where the shadows and such should end up, unlike the layer were I add little shinies on top of the eyes.

 

We’re not shading the shiny, the shiny is a highlight.

 

 

Before opening shading assist

Temporarily turn of the eye of the flat color layer, so that all color that is read is your ‘‘fill’’ layer.

 

To assure it does not misread, collapse the folder and make sure only the folder is selected before you open the shading assist menu.

Adding Backlight

The first shading assist preset we’re using is backlight. This is what it looks like upon first glance.

 

Because of my preferred settings, I will be changing the blending modes until it looks like this:

Press OK.

Because ‘‘screen’’ layer isn’t relevant to my technique, upon the creation of the shading assist layers, it can be deleted.

Now, merge the two multiply layers and temporarily turn multiply off so you can color pick the flat colors of this layer before turning it back on.

Once you have the two colors in your color history palette, you can easily swap between the two of them. Turn mutliply back on and begin ‘‘carving’’ the light color where you want the backlight to be on the same layer. Rather than using an eraser, use the darker color to remove your mistakes.

 

To keep this simple, just assume light is coming from behind, that means the light will not be hitting everything. We call this a ‘‘rim light’’ For more detailed explaination on how backlights work realistically, please preview a more professional guide, as I am only focussing on layer settings & presets here.

Once you’re happy with cleaning up the mutiply layer, gaussian blur it on the basic setting so the harsh edges soften a little bit.

Adding the Second Shading Assist Preset

Like we’ve done before, we’re leaving the flat-color layer invisible for the time being.

Once more, select the ‘‘fullbody’’ folder before opening shading assist again.

The effect we want is ‘‘morning’’

Morning adds once more a couple of layers I am not really interested in using as they are presented, please see the next image for what I’ve changed.

Like we’ve done for backlight, I intend to delete the screen layer entirely after pressing ‘‘ok’’ !

 

Make sure to color pick the color I’ve used for level 3 from my screenshot. I usually go for a color that looks close to the one in ‘‘hard light’’ but I need all layers to be set to multiply if I want to merge them, which is why we change it.

Make our backlight layer invisible for the time being and merge all of the ‘‘morning’’ layers in a singular multiply layer. Similar to previously, temporarily turn multiply off so you can easily color pick all the flats. before you start ‘‘carving’’ again.

Following the same steps as previously, clean up the multiply layer until it looks acceptable to you. I tend to erase the ‘‘shade’’ that was created around the lines, so it looks cleaner.

Once more, we blur with gaussian blur.

Some areas of the blur may feel too ‘‘hard’’ I recommend using the blur tool and gently brush among these harsher areas. Additionally you can take the blue shade color and apply some more gradients with an air brush.

Tweaking the Colors of the Multiply Layers

Now that we both have ‘‘backlight’’ and ‘‘morning’’ set up, we can flip backlight back on. For easier navigation I’ve renamed these layers. Preview the below image.

Before we start tweaking the color settings, there’s one more important first step, which is to turn the flat colors back on!

As a standalone, this rendition looks pretty neat & clean right? It can be done rather quickly once you have memorised the above steps. Usually rendering requires a lot more manual choice making for the shading colors, but the shading assist presets help with the primary colors for shading..

 

Now, we can kick it up a notch and customize these layers further. Say, what if we don’t find the current colors fitting to the overal mood of a scene? From it’s current appearance this character is stading in the shade of an early morning.

 

You COULD keep the backlight and morning layers seperate, but I am merging them before I do anything else.

While having the merged multiply layers selected, open up tonal correction, and play around with the hue. This is an easy method for changing the color of the shadows and light.

 

It’s a bit more advanched to play around with saturation / darkness & luminosity as well, so from here on the rules really depend on what color setting you want to play with most. What mood are you looking to get out of your piece?

 

Overall you can consider such a drawing finished, but you can also go back and add more rendering effects if you wish for your drawing to have more depth.

 

 

Finishing up

I decided I wanted to keep this piece simple, rather than adding more manual shadows and highlights, I opted for a slight tonal change before adding some color to the lineart.

Tips for coloring lineart

Make sure that your color layers are in a folder clipped to the lineart layer, so you draw in extra layers you can freely tweak inside this new folder.

 

Color picking the shadows as they are right now, using the ‘‘approximate color’’ palette I select colors that come close to the area where I am coloring the lineart of,

If I color lines of the skin, I am select colors that have a friendly contrast towards the skin. In this character’s case, red colors work well for those lines.

 

The line colors for the hair as example are more in range for the shadow colours around the hair. I am not trying to make the lineart too light.

This can be tedious when you’re not used to coloring your lineart, and I will say its not the end of the world if you decide not to color your lineart. I just like a bit of added softness personally.

Once I am happy with the colors, I do a few finishing touches.

 

1. Merge all layers as a copy using the layer > merge visible to new layer setting

2. gaussian blur this new layer on strength 15 rather than 6.00

3. Reduce opacity of this same layer to 20% afterwards.

4. Add my watermark on top (new layer)

5. Use layer > merge visible to new layer again.

6. This new merged layer, use chromatic abberation (Radial (use center point) intensity 8, angle 65)

7. Lower opacity of the merged layer until the colors don’t blur out the lineart too much anymore. It depends on your canvas size or lneart on what looks best sometimes- 77%-75% opacity works in some cases, otherwise 55-45%, for this drawing I lowered opacity to 35%.

 

These are personal choices and It might not work for your style, so you don’t have to follow them if you find them pointless.

 

 

Final thoughts

Shading assist can be quite handy, but if you’re not familiar with shading & direction in general, it might not be the right tool for you- just yet.

 

It can make for an interesting quicker ‘‘simpler’’ rendering of otherwise flatcolor drawings.

 

Play around with the presets and see where you end up, you might learn something I haven’t thought of yet myself!

 

I hope my input was a tiny bit insightful to how it can be used, at least.