The final image – let there be light!

All the layers turned on. One more to go – there needs to be some light down in that cave.

Color shading. This is done on a separate layer than the flat color and then set to “multiply” so that the color is both transparent and combines with the other layers.

Little details now, mostly in the mouths and eyes of the ghouls.

And all the major flat color has been laid down. Next will be shadow and color detailing.

The next step is to create a layer of flat color. Ghouls are, apparently, usually greenish or grayish. They have a lot of variation in color though so I don’t use the same color on more than two figures.

Once the illustration is scanned into Photoshop (and probably cleaned up) I copy it to two more layers and set those layers to “multiply”. That results in this greater saturation of color.

Most of the tutorials I read on painting and coloring recommend against using solid black in a painting’s shadows. Almost every time I’ve done that I’ve ended up going back and adding black into the composition. I like black. It’s one of my favorite colors. I recognize that true black rarely occurs in life. Still, I find that black helps to anchor an illustration for me.

I’m not sure if that makes sense. Anyway, here are the colored pencils with black ink shadows. The rest of the work will be done in Photoshop.

The next step is to go over everything with colored pencils.

The finished pencil drawing. Color comes next.