Fixing my Doodle

Well I forgot to colour one of the character's heads correctly in my previous post and went back to fix it, and thought I might as well break it down a little and look at my very flawed workflow.

First Sketch

So firstly I just sketch really, really roughly - the characters don't have distinguishing features at this point, so I just label them by name so I don't get mixed up.  I often just have all my sketchy characters on one layer and my background on another, unless I do a bit I really like and want to keep safe, in which case I'll sometimes just duplicate the layer so I can't mess up.

Second Sketch

My second character sketch layer's just to sort out the lines a little and add a bit of character to the characters; here I've changed Lilac's pose a little since I wanted her to look more relaxed.  I changed her wing position from the extreme of a flap to a sort of glide where she's adjusting her positioning, but just a little.  Scarlet's also been moved slightly so that she's not standing solidly on the roof, but she's half-perched, with her left foot ready to push her off into the air.

Third Sketch

Just meant to be a little cleaner than the second, with a touch more detail in places.  Reeeally minor adjustments to Jay and Lilac's face.  I'd usually do a lineart layer after this sketch, but since I'm lazy, I just did my best not to sketch too messily and coloured these lines instead.  The background's the same, with a little abuse of the shift key for the buildings in the back (it makes the paintbrush tool stick to straight lines, horizontally or vertically).

Background Colours and a Smidge of Gradient

Just dull flats on a new layer below the background's line layer (always keep backgrounds and characters separate, it helps a lot!).  I used a circular gradient to add a bit of light.

Character Flats

Next, I shamelessly steal my own friend's drawings.  Mwahaha!  I put the references just behind what I'm working on so that it's easy to check and make sure I'm not making horrendously stupid mistakes.  On a new layer below my characters lineart layer(s) - I had a separate one for Jay but since the others barely overlap, and I'm lazy, they share a layer - and use the eyedropper tool to take colours from the shamelessly stolen artwork.  Then, it's colouring in time, since my linework was too godawful to let me use the paint bucket tool, and I'm not bright enough to figure out a clever way around that.

This is the layer I jumped back to in order to fix Pink's head colour.  Always keep an original .PSD file! :)

Flats Combined

And here's what I end up with.  Look at Tweak's face, he has absolutely no idea where he's going or if there's a bird of prey eyeing him up at this very minute.  Bless his sockless feet.

Bricks, Shading, Highlights, and Lighting

I add a new layer above each of the character flats layers and use Ctrl + Alt + G (I think it might be Command + alt + G on a Mac, but don't hold me to that), and this locks anything I draw on this new layer to only occupy space that's not transparent on the layer below.  Cool, eh?  It means that I can just lazily scrawl shading on without having to worry about keeping to any of the outer lines.  Same is true for the highlights, which I add on top of the shadow layer.  It's nice to alter the colour of the shadows depending upon the colour and surface of the object your shading, but in this case I just used a nice solid black with a brush with 100% opacity and 0% hardness.  Same for the highlights, using a slightly paler colour from the sky.

Then I added another circular gradient, much narrower than the first, to give a bit of a lens flare look.  While I think it makes the colours too strong (especially on poor Tweak, who looks like someone tried to kill him with a dodge tool) it was a little experimental, as I've never used the gradient tool for lighting before this.

The texture I borrowed from cgtextures.com I added to a new layer above the background flats and used Ctrl+alt+G to lock them to the contents of the flats layer.  I changed their layer type to overlay, reduced the layer opacity to about 35% and then trimmed away at any problem areas.  I know the textures are a bit badly placed, too.  XD

Final Edits

Here's the finished one, with a few edits from the one in my last post (corrected Pink, sharper and whiter sun, less yellow overlay, bluer sky).  :)

Quick, I need a Youtube video.  Uhm... uh...

Save me, Dragonzball P!

Wait, this isn't Dragonzball P...