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So let’s use these techniques and shade in the eyes and the lips.
Using the same Brush and Dodge tool techniques, let’s shade in the rest of our subjects’ bodies, being mindful of the direction of the light source and the shadows their hair or their clothes will cast on their skin.
It’s starting to come together nicely if I do say so myself! Now repeat for the clothes. Take note of the folds of clothing and the shadows the clothing creates upon each other when they are layered. Where the clothing is tighter, there will be lots of small folds, whereas where the clothing is looser, the folds will be large and flowier.
We are almost done our subjects!
The last step with our subjects is what I think is the most annoying and time consuming part of coloring a human—the hair. First let’s generally shade in the hair using the Brush and Dodge we should be very familiar with by this stage.
Now pull out your Wacom tablet, make sure it’s pressure sensitivity functions are working, choose a small Smudge tool (R) and set its Strength to something really high, like 90%.
Now use the Smudge tool with the Wacom tablet and drag the colors in the rough highlights and shadows that we filled in before back and forth in the direction of hair flow. You will get the effect that a mass block of color is actually countless individual strands of hair.
And our subjects are complete!
Part 3 – Background
First, let’s merge all of the layers used for creating our subject so they don’t get confused with the layers we will use to create our background. I like to create a new file to finish off my images so I can still keep a file with all of the subject’s layers. Because the plan for the background is to be a landscape, let’s make the new image horizontal. We’ll paste the subject in and then fill the background. I thought for a long time about what to make the background before finally settling on using a dramatic sunset. So let’s fill in the background with a vibrant orange gradient fading into a paler orange where the sun meets the horizon using the Gradient tool (G).