Welcome

Hello everyone! H3CN0 here, first time sharing a tip. I started drawing and painting digitally last year and this site has been really helpfull, so today I'm sharing some ideas for beginners.

All you need to follow this is a drawing program (in this case we use CSP but you can use whatever you like) and time to try this on different surfaces and situations. If there is a term that you're not familiarized with, please search for it on this same page, and you will find many answers!.

Starting

All you need in this point is your software and a drawing. This is my selection, a very simple drawing with a anatomy detail that I'll work with shades to make it look nice.

The next thing you want is to choose your light source, that is, where your light is in this scene.

In very complex scenes, there can be many light sources, but in this first approximation we will consider only one.

In this first case, we start with the source BEHIND the subject, as you can see right next

Shade mapping with colors

Here I'll explain you how I see it in my mind...In the shading process you assign tones depending on DEPTH, you need to identify which parts are closer and have direct sight to the light sources and wich don't, what parts are behind another one...and so on. For this porpouse, I made a map of shadows, where i use diferent colors to represent quickly the distribution of light.

Now, create a new raster layer and for the map.

For this model, this is my map:

Here, the blue part represents sections with more light, green parts are on the middle, and red parts are the darker ones. for this maps i recommend using the G-pen with no stabilization, because the idea is to make a map in a minute or so, and spend all your time doing the shading itself.

Using the airbrush

Now, we start painting. We now reduce the opacity of the layer containing the map and clip a new raster layer above the layer with your flat, selecting multiply as the blending mode.

Now, with the help of a soft airbrush, we shade everything except where our map has nothing (in this case, the borders of the figure).

Here is the first layer of the shading:

Looks better, but can improve a lot. For that, we do more shading layers with the same preset (clipped to the flat and multiply as blending mode). In the next step you should shadow every color except blue, after that, just paint the red zones, and so on if you made more zones.

You can do as many as you want, and achieve any level of detail using a soft transition between shadows.

My shading layers look like this:

And the shading:

As you can see, even in this simple figure, it looks way better than before.

If you find yourself having some rough shadows and you want it to look more organic, you always can use the blurring tool to achieve that:

You also can use this technique without using the airbrush to shade, but the lasso tool, or a pen and the bucket. With this two options, you can do hard shadows or soft shadows, using the blurring tool for this last one. I explain this in the video with more detail.

Another sources

In the video I explore other source positioning, and how the technique works there too.

For example:

Front Source-Map

Front Source-Shading

Side Source-Map

Side Source-Shading

Testing your shading

You can test your shading using gradient maps according to what you're painting. You can make your own or use existing ones. There are many good ones in the Clip Studio Assets page https://assets.clip-studio.com/

Here is how you use them:

Right clip in your top layer-New Correction layer-Gradient Map

Then you can select a map and try it on your drawing. If it lacks depth, you can go back to the greyscale shading and refine it.

Here is the result of using a gradient map on one the front source shading:

Finishing

Here I just covered the greyscale shading, but if I see any interest, I will for sure do a post about color shading, which is way more complex because you need to consider the nature of the light source and other phenomena.

Hope you like it! You can follow me on my social media accs: