I have a few different methods of painting, but for this post I'll focus on the style I like to use for anthro/fantasy character designs.



Most of the time I'll start drawing directly into Photoshop, since I tend to draw better with my tablet anyway, and I don't have a very good workspace in my apartment for drawing (it's tiny). The first sketch is always very messy, and for this example I didn't save a .jpg of it, so we'll go straight to the lineart:



These are my friend Talathia's characters, done for a recent trade. The cat is Aubrey and the dog is Yepa.

Luckily for this image I had some pretty good guidelines to go on- Tala had done a very loose sketch of her own, and told me specifically what she wanted. In this case, the two were running through a forest at night, so Aubrey had to be in the foreground and Yepa slightly behind and off balance, as though she were being dragged along.

If you ever need references for poses, Posemaniacs.com is a great resource.



I used a slightly different technique than I usually do by using the paint bucket to fill in the linework. After that I went back and did highlights with the hard paintbrush, then smoothed it out with the soft airbrush. I like this style because it's almost cell-shaded, but not quite; like an animated movie or something.

The boots were referenced from various pictures on Google image search. The rest of his clothes were pretty generic, so no refs were needed.



Next came Yepa, using the same techniques. Her shoes I referenced from my own, and I designed the rest of the clothes.

About the background: I generally create a new layer below the lineart, fill it with an appropriate colour, then merge the two. It wasn't absolutely necessary for this picture, other than to save my eyes from the white glare. In others, the fill is used as an underpainting, and to help me choose a colour scheme for the overall picture.

I finally started in on the background by creating a new layer beneath the characters, using the magic wand on the purple fill and getting rid of it.



As you can see, at this stage the characters are far too bright for the background. Well, that's easily remedied.



Creating yet another (multiply) layer above the characters, I changed the opacity to something like 20% and chose a medium blue for shadows. I hid the character layer to show the shadow layer.



Finally, I added a black border to make it resemble a still from an animated movie. Dunno if that worked well, but I like the final result.

I haven't done much more of this colouring style yet, though I've started a few pieces:



A better example of the base layer fill before I start building up shadows and highlights.







Well, I hope that was enlightening and/or useful. Next time I'll talk about designing anthropomorphic characters- specifically, lizards and rodents.