shallow:

i know u only asked about colors but i love to talk about myself so i chose to explain my entire process instead. i have so much power. I HAVE SO MUCH POWER !!!!! 

couple things of interest first:

• the brush i use for most of my sketching/coloring is still the “oil pastel large 2” from the set linked here
• i also use a solid, hard-edged brush for more precise color/clean-up work (no opacity/flow control) that i modified from another set that i can’t find — but that’s not super important, i just needed any hard-edged brush 
• #wip has a bunch of photosets of progress on some of my better work

ANYWAY MOVING ON IM GONNA BE USING THIS PIC (its the recent gross one with the bugs/body horror) TO EXPLAIN MY WORKFLOW … LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT TO KNOW THE WORKFLOW OF A PARTICULAR PIC THOUGH BC SOMETIMES ITS SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT 

start off with a loose sketch but in reality i’m shit at drawing, look at how i tried to use “”“action lines”“” but failed miserably and then had no idea what to do with any part of the body below the shoulders and gave him backwards chicken wings for arms 

draw the head hilariously too big and then accept that you will have to figure out a better pose for the body if you want to move forwards, with this picture, with your life, with your hollow empty existence

fuck, ok, that’ll work

“HE LOOKS LIKE HES SINGING” I WAIL AT THIS POINT “AND EVEN WORSE IT LOOKS LIKE HES SINGING LINKIN PARK”

also of note, i put lines for different components on different layers — so in this pic i have a “skin” layer which is just the lines for the underlying body, “hair”, “clothes”, etc. the reason for this is because i colorize my lines later and separating them at the start makes that easy because then i can just lock transparency + fill. google search ”colorize lines photoshop“ for more on that

i’m paranoid about erasing lines so i always use layer masks to “erase” stuff

THIS WAS NOT THE SORT OF PICTURE THAT COULD WORK WITH A FLAT BG (ok it probably could but i wasnt willing to try) so i just threw down a bg layer of red, slapped a gradient on it, then went to town with cloudy/wavy shit using the first brush i mentioned above

then i block out the shape of the character. i have a lazy way of doing it and i tried to explain with a gif but as soon as i finished making it, i realized it was laughably unhelpful:

your homework is to figure out what i was actually trying to explain with this gif because fuck if i know

use the blocked-out shape from above to create a layer mask for a group, then throw down other colors within the group. the layer mask means you don’t have to worry about coloring outside of the outer edges:

shit, i love demonstrating photoshop mechanics that have been around since the dawn of time as if they’re actual useful art techniques 

COLORIZE LINES !!!!! i set my lines to Multiply. the above gif shows how those lines look, at the expense of your eyes 

draw centipedes now

OK HERE IS WHERE THE MAJORITY OF MY WORK IS DONE …. PAINTING OVER / CLEANING UP 

i make a layer (more like 10 layers) above everything else to focus on the following:

• cleaning up stray lines
• better defining edges/corners/shapes
• adding half-assed color/shading
• body hair 
• blood that looks like paint
• bot flies 

what? what??? shallow your colors were so dull and shitty before, what happened ????????? well heres the secret: my colors only look “”“good”“” thanks to photoshop adjustment layers. not any actual skill with color, no discussion of color theory or contrast or anything, just the magic of photoshop fueled by angry white boy music. i’ve strung you along this whole damn way just to tell you that i’m a fucking shill. i spend my days sitting in front of a computer and cycling through various barely different color schemes for my text editor and at night i come home and pretend to be an artist who has something interesting and meaningful to rollout to the world, whether it be art or art help, but really i’m just a fucking hack who never went to art school and the only colors i know how to use are varying shades of red

here is a gif of you, played by my cat, pulling away in disgust