help! need help w/ digital coloring & rendering (w/o lines!)

[Trippin Tacos]

Help!

Major questions: what am I doing bad? what am I doing good (if anything)?

specifics: How can I get past my fear of going darker? What brushes should I be using aside from pencil, school pen, watercolor, and airbrush? Am I even using them right? What other layers should I be using aside from normal and multiply? Why do my lines with the school pen (line art) look fuzzy- should I be working bigger? etc...



Posted below is my first attempt at serious shading, so aside from a half-assed reading of one OC tutorial, I have no idea what I’m doing.  

[Trippin Tacos]

for starters I drew it way too small, so here's a zoomed in screenshot:






my goal is to ditch the line art almost entirely once my shading can withstand it. I can't figure out how those people do it. If i ditched line art, my piece would be a blob

Any & all suggestions are greatly appreciated  

[ScarletFrost]

For starters, I like your overall style. I'm not much of an art critic, so I'll just share some tips I've learned over the years.

One thing that has helped me get a better feel for colors and contrasts is to nix the white background. I know it's second nature to those of us who started out traditionally, but the white will make your darks feel TOO dark and bleach out your highlights. Try a 50% grey background. Then work down to darks as you shade and up to lights as you highlight. A good exercise is to draw different light levels--day, night, dusk, face under-lit-by-flashlight, etc.

For size, just use a bigger canvas and zoom out so you can draw comfortably in that space. Then zoom in to add details. Also, if you're scanning in traditional art and then coloring it, you might want to try a higher resolution scan. I always go 300x300 dpi at minimum.

I know how you feel about the whole line art thing. I'm pretty much resigned myself to being a comicbook-style artist. I just need the lines to define my world!! ninja  

[Trippin Tacos]

ScarletFrost

For starters, I like your overall style. I'm not much of an art critic, so I'll just share some tips I've learned over the years.

One thing that has helped me get a better feel for colors and contrasts is to nix the white background. I know it's second nature to those of us who started out traditionally, but the white will make your darks feel TOO dark and bleach out your highlights. Try a 50% grey background. Then work down to darks as you shade and up to lights as you highlight. A good exercise is to draw different light levels--day, night, dusk, face under-lit-by-flashlight, etc.

For size, just use a bigger canvas and zoom out so you can draw comfortably in that space. Then zoom in to add details. Also, if you're scanning in traditional art and then coloring it, you might want to try a higher resolution scan. I always go 300x300 dpi at minimum.

I know how you feel about the whole line art thing. I'm pretty much resigned myself to being a comicbook-style artist. I just need the lines to define my world!! ninja

the background idea sounds great, I'll definitely try that with my next attempt, thanks c;

the size part was kind of my own fault, out of habit. I actually had a large canvas, I just then zoom in on it too. So when I zoom out again, I might as well have used a canvas 1/5 of the size :< zooming out instead is probably a good idea

& i know right! xD my next attempt (this could be a complete failure) is to do the line art 'multi-colored'- the outline will be a shade or two darker than the base tone I put inside. It will probably look awful, but hopefully it'll give me an idea as to what to try next.