Shadowing Markmywords style

[MarkMyWords]

Hello Woodwater, sorry I took so long to reply, work, work, work. You know how it is.

Here is a copy of the XAR file for my avatar. I start with a cell-shaded approach, the style that is so popular in Manga and anime, I'm sure you have seen it. Each colour is a separate shape.

So make your face shape, give it the basic flesh colour you want, then draw in the shadow as a hard edged shape and choose a colour which is a darker shade of your basic flesh colour. From this point on it gets complicated. If you look closely at my avatar you can see that there are few really flat colours. The base flesh colour has a very subtle fill gradient from darker at the bottom left to lighter at the top right. The shadow has another subtle linear fade, this is a fill gradient from darker on the left to lighter on the right. On top of these I have put some very feint hi-lights on the forehead and cheeks. White shapes flat fills, with both a linear transparency fade and feathering.

To get the best from this technique, you do need to be familiar with shading to emulate 3 dimensional views. I hope this is helpful.