Malfey's Shading Tutorial

1. Once you're done lining and filling in the base colors, get yourself ready. ;v; There is no specific brush to do this: just make sure you have it toggled to that the opacity changes depending on pen pressure.

2. Make a new layer, and set it to multiply. Now, the most important thing. NEVER. Shade in black/grey. Unless you have a certain style going on, like comic style and stuff, or a certain color scheme, color is always preferred. Black and grey are very boring. 
What I do is shade with the COMPLIMENTARY color of the base I'm shading on. It highlights the difference between the subject and the shadow. A complimentary color is the color opposite to yours on the color wheel. Sometimes I go with one very close to that color. I chose blue because purple was a bit too strong.

3. NOW for shading and where. Think of it raining. Or fire hitting you idk xD Now, if you were positioned like this egg-grem over here, which parts of you would be more likely to get hit according to where the light source/destruction flame is? The tip of his head, thigh, and other parts of his body that aren't being covered by something else. There may be some bits that have light, but are more faint. Think the rain managed to reach there, or rebounded there, but not as effectively as though it had been fully exposed. His back leg and back tail are being covered, so they will be shaded. A knee bulges out more and sticks out, so it will be lighter. Same with knuckles, some parts of the fur, etc.

4. Now that that's out of the way, I can play around with the color of the shadows more. I made some areas darker by locking the pixels and painting over the shadows with a big soft brush.

5. I like to play around with the shades and give them a rainbow gradient sometimes! As long as the gradient flows properly in the spectrum, not green then suddenly red then idk it will look pretty coherent! Jamming random colors together CAN work sometimes, but you seriously have to know what you're doing. ( rudimentary practice/example   Probably not a good reference but you get the idea) I won't get into that sort of thing now.

6. Make a new layer with either the overlay or color dodge blend mode. I prefer color dodge, but be warned its very bright! I use a sort of orange-ish to yellow color for highlights. Again, white is dull and boring. Only for extremely strong light is it white. In this case, it looks white because Egg is basically white anyway

7. Apply with the same "its raining fire" thought as in process 3 for the light. Where does it hit hardest?

8. Blur the parts of the shades and light where the light sort of "fades" or hits less hard.

9. These lines are optional, but ambient light is not. Ambient light is when the light of the background reflects and rebounds on your subject. It doesn't need to be a source of light. Just the bg in general. If your BG was green, the ambient light will be a dull green. In this case it was white, so I made it blue. Ambient light is ALWAYS on the side of the shades. Sometimes normal side too. This thin line though is optional.

10. This part is not optional. Use a big soft brush to make the ambient light. Have it on a new layer and keep the mode normal

11-12. Lastly, color the lines! Set your line mode multiply and color the lines the same color as whatever is under that particular area. If his ears are blue, color the lines near his ear blue, etc.

And your done!

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I am terrible at explaining, I have all this stuff in my head but I don't know how to word it <__> If you have any questions at all, please do not hesitate to ask! I will try my best to explain.

Let me know if this helped! It would mean a lot. I hope I managed to aid in some way! Also, if you guys actually draw anything using this tutorial as reference, show me, I'd love to see! Cheers guys!

Grems (c) MrGremble