#like dont just blindly copy their palette cause you don't learn anything

[missusruin]

I’ve been dying to ask for a while: How do you choose colors for shading?? Every piece you post leaves me absolutely awestruck! Do you experiment with layer filters (multiply, darken, etc.) or do you eyeball your palette?

There are a lot of very comprehensive videos and tutorials online about almost any art thing that'll be more helpful than me otl. So i'd suggest looking those up for like actual direction and learning proper color theory so you know how to problem solve for whatever you're drawing. I don't really render complicated because I don't like most super rendered styles. Shading color depend a lot on bg/environment too which I also don't draw a lot of lol. So I just wanna put out there that there's a LOT to say on this subject.

Anyway my smooth brain reply is "make a layer, set to multiply, use a purple, lower opacity". It's what I usually do if I'm just slapping shading on a drawing of a character floating in solid color bg purgatory.

On more elaborate drawings I'll consider which colors are reflecting off eachother and how I'm using warm vs cool and the saturation of the local colors and what needs to stand out. But for simple stuff "a purple on multiply" will cover most bases without making the drawing look gross and dull. A step above that is messing with the kind of purple youre using, like temperature and saturation. And then if I wanna try out random weird shit I'll make a gradient map correction layer, pick a palette, and mess with the layer settings to see what funky combos come up.