Im gonna try to describe this as detailed as possible. When it comes to fan art or just art on Deviantart I see a lot of drawings with a really cool shadow or fading on the skin, hair, clothes, eyes and simply everything on the drawing so it looks exactly like this photo of Ventus with the shade of shadows. I have Photoshop and Ive tried to do the same but it never turns out with that cool skin shadow/fade that Im trying to do. Ive seen that there are people here on the site that does draw or paint and Im asking you guys how do I do this. I really want to learn how to cause it could make my drawings so much better than they are. I hope I described it as easy as possible I would be really grateful if someone would help me out.

 

Im gonna try to describe this as detailed as possible. When it comes to fan art or just art on Deviantart I see a lot of drawings with a really cool shadow or fading on the skin, hair, clothes, eyes and simply everything on the drawing so it looks exactly like this photo of Ventus with the shade of shadows. I have Photoshop and Ive tried to do the same but it never turns out with that cool skin shadow/fade that Im trying to do. Ive seen that there are people here on the site that does draw or paint and Im asking you guys how do I do this. I really want to learn how to cause it could make my drawings so much better than they are. I hope I described it as easy as possible I would be really grateful if someone would help me out.

 

The whole process of learning it is HARD. Using a graphics/drawing tablet like the Bamboo ones will make your life easier. To fade the shadows you need to lower the opacity on your brush in Photoshop. A drawing tablet has pressure sensitivity so the harder you press with the stylus the more paint will come out. With a mouse you'll have to manually keep changing opacity. Another thing is understand color theory; Things like: shadows aren't just black, light bounces, etc.

For Example, if you take a closer look at Ventus

 

you'll see that those really dark shadows aren't pure black but actually a really dark purplish-red, and his pants aren't just grey and black but they have traces of orange, blue and red. Same things go for the all the other parts; You have to use more than just the obvious color to get a really nice looking picture. You can open that picture up in Photoshop and use the color picker to see approximately the different colors used on the different parts.

 

I'm still trying to learn to paint well myself. In terms of practicing there are plenty of coloring tutorials on Deviantart and Youtube you could search up. Here's a few I collected on Deviantart: http://soulscore.deviantart.com/favourites/39651902/Tutorials-Resources. Plus doing things like trying to accurately copy other pictures (like that Ventus one) or real life pictures will help. If you look at the Forums on Deviantart you'll also see many others asking similar things and generally the better artist will tell people to learn realism and the fundamentals of art(shape, value ,anatomy, lighting, color, perspective, etc) if they truly wish to become better at whatever style they want. Hope that helps a little.

 

Here's my Deviantart gallery if your curious what my art looks like: http://soulscore.deviantart.com/gallery/