Starting to shade the man

After filling all the block colours within my poster i then decided to embark on how to shade my character who as a main focal point was pretty intergral to my design. id roughly planned out how to approach this task within my sketchbook and after some brief experimentation i began by using the paintbrush to fill in some of the solid areas of shade ( i chose a middle grey which made it easier to blend darker or lighter depending on where i started tonally - i also kept the opacity low in order to map out where i wanted the tones to gradient out from).

after this i then chose a basic watercolour brush ( one that didnt contain shading but did depict the soft smooth edges) and slowly added varying stroke to begin generating tone.

i did find that manipulating the same colour and simply altering the opacity of it worked much better when blending the tones together espescailly when creating the base. it allowed me to introduce a sense of light and dark without it getting too complicated and lost in the various colours. it was also particularily useful in terms of the watercolour brush ( since these brushes tended to lighten whatever tone i used anyway it was a lot easier to use black which actually came out mid grey due to the brush style). after using this technique on all my areas of shade i then wanted to incorporate some more defined and textural strokes which i achieved by using a scroll brush.

when using scroll brushes i generally started with a larger stoke ( 3/4) and a fatter brush using the lightest tone of grey and gradually getting darker to generate the tonal gradient. this much like the watercolour brushes created a base from which i could introduce additional details. once this base was finished i used thinner and smaller scroll brushes to blend the tones together starting from the lightest tone to the darkest was more practical because it was easier to layer the tones on the lighter than to try lightening the really dark ones. im actually really pleased with how the shading has turned out ( i was initially worried because its hand drawn). i also found it useful to occasionally introduce occasional strokes of a curved waved ink pen which had enough shape to blend well into the white areas of the man but was solid enough to convey the tone.

i continued this on the arm ( which had a larger gradient of tone that needed to be added so i simply increased the brush size accordingly) and on the rest of the chest.  adding dappled blue stokes to intergrate the blue tone in my design was failry easy and since the colour was so light i generally blended inward using the white scroll pen to texturise the edges of the colour.