Congrats! You have a very specific goal! That’s great. Now you have to do some career stalking:

1—Make a list of the artists in the credits, and any sub-contracting companies they work for (for example, concept artists & FX artists can work for the main studio directly OR they can work for subcontracted companies like ILM, Weta, etc.)

2—Find the companies and the artists on their social media accounts and follow all of them. They will post about their work, as well as online interviews, podcasts, seminars, and events they’re going to attend.

3—Watch/read all those interviews - every one will talk about how the artist got to be where they are.

4—Follow as much of their advice as you can about what skills you need and what to put in your portfolio.

5—Then try to get to seminars and events they have in person. Ask politely for a portfolio review. Or just hang around after they give a speech and chat. Or find them in the hotel bar after and chat. Offer to buy them a drink if you can ask them some industry questions (but don’t be creepy about it, tell them you’d like to pick their brain for a few minutes so they don’t think you’re hitting on them).

6—On both social media and/or in person, ask intelligent questions (not just the ones they’ve answers 100x in interviews already that you’ve already watched/read in step 3).

By this point they’ll probably be recognizing your name/face/work from you following them and being a good fan of their work. And you probably will be already started on your career, bc you’ve been following their advice. This is how relationships start. Remember, they don’t OWE you anything for your following/being a fan, but good artists like to help people trying to break into the biz, so maybe they’ll remember you when they need to form a team for a project, or need to recommend someone.

Ta-Da! Easy right? Now go do it!

—Agent KillFee

ahh thank you so much! ♥ welcome to the digial art scene friend, i hope you enjoy your stay and ctrl + z

now onto your question! (if you don’t know what layer and layer modes are and how they generally work you should probably google that before you continue reading)

we all perceive colour differently (thx science) and i trust my intuition a lot when it comes to colour picking because of that, and also because i feel like you can make pretty much every colour combination work within the right context. context is key! but still, remember that all of this is about how i perceive colour, so you might not agree with everything i say.

here’s a quick rundown of terms you’ll see around a lot in reference to colours and shading: the hue, which is the ‘colour’ itself, the saturation aka the intensity, and the brightness [or value] which describes how dark or bright we perceive a colour to be.

rule of thumb: when you shade don’t just add black (or white) to your base colours, that will make your drawings boring and lifeless. use different hues and saturation!

now first things first: which skin colour does the character have?

you’ll mostly be navigating in the red to yellow spectrum for the skin tone. so when i pick the base colours i usually start with the skin and adjust the rest of the colours accordingly. if you’re not sure where to begin it might help if you first determine the values (brightness) of the base colours in grayscale.

and here are a few colour variations—i stuck to the approximate values but played around with a lot of different hues and levels of saturation.

now compare 3 and 5: you’ll notice that 3 is very bright and leans towards orange hues, whereas 5 has a pinkish tint.

on the left i gave 5 the hair colour of 3 and in my opinion the pink hue of the skin doesn’t go well with the orange undertone of the hair. you’ll have to experiment a lot to find out which combinations work for you.  

ctrl + u is your biggest friend (or image >> adjustments >> hue/saturation in photoshop, the shortcut works in sai and clip studio paint too). play with the sliders and see what happens. i do that a lot myself, because it’s easier to coordinate the colours like that afterwards instead of trying to manually pick perfectly matching ones right away.

for further adjustments i like to use an extra semi-transparent layer on top of everything with just a single colour to add atmospheric light. this unifies the colours and makes them more harmonious, if that’s what you’re looking for. this is about as far as i’d go if i didn’t want to shade the drawing.

if i do want to shade, especially with high contrasts and dramatic light, i darken the base by just adding an additional black layer, here set to 40% opacity. of course you could add a colour layer like the ones i mentioned previously too.

to create an impression of dramatic light you need a high contrast between light and dark areas (1). if i want additional visual intrest i often add secondary light which falls onto the main shadow areas. here i picked a faint greenish blue to balance out the yellow (2). and since light is at least partially reflected when it hits a surface you should add a faint glow that goes across the shadow/light border. i uses a mid-brown with a very soft brush on a layer set to overlay here (3).

for this shading style i like to use the layer mode colour dodge with lowered opacity + fill settings. for some layer modes opacity and fill do the exact same thing (e.g. for multiply or screen). however for colour dodge there’s a big difference:

a lowered opacity merely alters the transparency of the entire layer. that looks pretty awful sometimes, because the bright orange affects the dark of the hair much more intensely than the already brighter skin. but when you lower the fill percentage you primarily lower the amount of light that falls onto darker colours. so the layer’s opacity setting treats every colour equally whereas the fill setting takes their values into consideration. it might be hard to understand if you don’t try it out yourself, so just play around to get a feel for how it works!

and to summarise, here’s a process gif:

colour is an extremely big topic and i’ve only barely scratched the surface but i hope that still helped you out a little! the fastest way to learn is always to try things yourself, so grab a sketch and experiment. 👍

Yay, hey there! First of all, thanks for the message!

I use Photoshop, and I have been using Kyle’s brushes for a while now. They used to be paid, but now they’re available for anyone with the CC subscription here:

Here is my list of textured brushes from Kyle’s:

Now, here is the trick:
I don’t outright paint with this textured brushes. I start most of the painting with the default/softer brushes, paint most o the thing, and on top of that I add points of interest and texture to the paint. This way you can add variety and subtlety to your texture/brushwork :)

Something like this:

Hope this helps!