[Funk Master Kane]

I use photoshop 6 and painter 7. i can't seem to shade my characters in the way of giving them shape definition, likes their noses and hands. My art looks good now, but i just don like having outlines to give my character shape. Does any one have any tips that can help me

[Ian Jones]

Basically there are two types of drawing systems:

Line, which is what you refer to as being shapes and forms defined by lines in your art.

Tonal, which is shading done by means of varying values from light to dark. This is what the majority of us do here at Sijun.

You wanted to get away from lines, so scrap them altogether, except at the initial sketch stage. Essentialy you are trying to render a form (form = 3d object, its depth and shape). What you need to consider is how that form is lit. We start with complete darkness. A ball for example in complete darkness is well... dark. Then you need to consider how you will light it. From the top left? top right, bottom right, bottom left, in front of it, behind it?

Once you figure out where you want the light to come from you imagine rays of light shining on your object and begin to shade it. A ball is being lit by a single source of light eg.. a lamp, from the top left. Basically you make the point of the ball that is closest to the light source a light tonal value, almost white if you want. Then the ball gets progressively darker until it reaches a point where the rays of light don't hit it. This is called a 'form shadow' (as opposed to a 'cast shadow').

There you go, that is it really. Just visualize where rays of light will hit and render away!

I hope thats what you wanted.

[zak]

*nods and agrees with ian

have a really loose initial sketch i say, and set it to low opacity, sothat you can just about see what youre doing, about halfway through delete the layer altogether. thats what i do, it takes time to master, it is the harder option after all, but its worth all the effort

[mitch]

When I started I didnt erase my lines, I set my lines as a multiply layer in photoshop and painted underneath. I think it might be easier to start that way, at least its a little less work. In terms of understanding shading, it sometimes helps to think of it like sculpting. Think of modeling the surface with your paint. Another good way to start is by painting the entire image dark first, almost black. Then model the various forms with a midtone, think of bubbles as your doing this, using different size brushes for different areas and sizes of detail. Once this looks supafly use the dodge tool sparingly to add highlights. The method I use now is 4 tone. I pick say, a dark red and a lighter red(both in the midtone range) and paint the whole image the darker red. I model with the lighter color and then finish with the burn and dodge tools. Keep in mind that if you paint dark on top of light, your dark comes forward, if you paint light on top of dark, the light comes forward, which is what happens in the natural world, so you usually want to finish with a light. If I want to have no line drawing in my image i take off the line drawing layer at the very end and finish the painting from there. Maybe a longer asnwer than you wanted. PACE!

[Bilbo]

just to add a little to what ian said-
the amount of light hitting a surface varies not only according to the distance from the lightsource but also (and even more importantly) by the angle of that surface relative to the lightsource.. when you want to shade a head, a nose, whatever- try thinking of it as a simple object made of straight planes. the more a plane faces the light, the brigher it will get..if a plane faces away from the light it will be dark. as you work, continue refining these simple objects into more complex sub-objects.
as a learning tool- use reference as much as possible. after you draw several (read:"many") noses and hands from reference you'll do better when trying to create them yourself.