Sæglópur: sometimes when I concentrate really hard on making art, I drool on myself.
elDino: I'm so glad, thank you!
icepick: YOU BETTER DRAW >:|
Master Win: I will probably be long-winded, so! Firstly I *do* like gyarados, buuuut I have commissions I should be working on and also my senior year of Illustration coming up, so I won't be doing requests.
As for your art-related questions, I will do my best to answer you even though quite frankly I don't exactly get what you're asking- I think it's a case of the following: I've been doing this for a really long time, so it's hard for me to describe a part of the process I don't even think about doing.
'Shading' isn't a step I use anymore, in the sense of most digital art tutorials. I don't go through and put a cellshaded layer on anything-- 'Painting' would be a more accurate term for the process I use, which is layering, layering, rubbing away, painting opaque, glazing, layering more... bringing the lights back out, and so on. I don't put down new colors on new layers in the traditional sense. Like, Blaziken's yellow bits are not on a different layer from his red bits-- this is how I painted years ago but when I took traditional painting classes, I stopped doing this for a more painterly look rather than hard-edged animation-inspired stuff.
I only use new layers to achieve two things: 1. If I fuck up a big change I am making, I can just delete the layer or edit it without worrying about the underpainting, and 2. Putting on new effects to the overall image. For instance, 'Glazing' requires a new layer always, but then I will just making a 'Normal' layer over that and paint anything I want. I won't touch on glazing right now since I have a tutorial a couple pages back (the Reshiram painting).
When I have put down a glaze to determine: color change, shadows, lights, emphasis, whatever, and rubbed it away, I will then paint over that on a new layer with an opaque brush, specifically to make brush strokes and get PRECISE. I use whatever brush I want... it's, er, just whatever I feel like that day. This brushset is one of the first ones I got, and I still use it frequently:
http://adonihs.deviantart.com/art/My-Brush-Pack-118954791
The soft round he has that tapers AND goes less opaque is one of my favs for small detailing. The less pressure, the lighter it is *and* the thinner it is. Feels good, man.
I use whatever opacity the situation calls for-- really subtle painting should be done with a lower opacity. BETTER than the opacity, though, is the 'flow'. Feels more realistic for me; I keep it around 60% most times. Size also depends on what brush shape I'm using and what I'm trying to paint; I have hundreds of brushes now that I just use at random, practically. A lot of them are meant for speedpainting but are great for other stuff too.
So I'm sorry if I'm not understanding what you're asking me, but a lot of what I do is not systematic in the least-- I've been getting looser and faster, just because it's easier to paint freely than fill things in one layer at a time.
My biggest technique is that I will constantly merge the entire image, getting rid of layers, save it under a changed filename (BLAZIKEN1.psd, BLAZIKEN2.psd), make a new layer and paint directly on top of the old image. I hate clutter. I hate having 108 layers, especially because I DON'T do digital collage, I don't do cellshading, etc. I paint more haphazardly these days than I ever have in my life, so it's hard to explain the process. Hope it helps though!