Step 4 - Shading the Skirt

Firstly I’m going to show you some simple shading. The human body is not flat it is rounded therefore the bit closest to you (the middle) will be lighter than the sides, even though we add folds into clothes this still applies in dolls so the middle of the skirt/top/boot etc should be lighter than the outside. Many brilliant dollers produce flatter looking dolls because they’re so caught up in folding they forget about making it look 3D. If you want to give your dolls a wow factor beyond good shading skills, 3D is the way to go.

Now back to the doll. Go to the layer with the red skirt on it and lock the transparency.

Then pick the airbrush hard round brush and set it to size 2 or 3 (depending on how large the bit your shading is, I’ll be using 2 here) Set the Opacity to somewhere between 50 and 70% and the Flow at the same.
I personally don’t use palettes, I make up the colour as I go along but I’ll record the colours here for you to watch what I do.

Starting with a colour slightly darker than your flat colour use the brush to build in the rough areas of shadow. You may wish to refer back to your sketch at this point to see where you roughed in the folds.
Don’t worry if there is not much definition here, I work in high contrast so definition comes in later. Remember to add casting shadow under any other items of clothing such as the jacket.

Then using an even darker colour start to define the folds more. Remember your brush is quite large so don’t worry too much about details.

I now add a bit of highlight using a slightly lighter colour, sometimes I will change the hue slightly for the highlight too.

Your skirt will now have quite a lot of definition in the colour but will look quite fuzzy where folds are concerned. Now reduce the size of your brush to 1px. I start with shadows so darken the colour considerably to add the defining shadows. Don’t be afraid to go overboard with your shadows, we still have highlights to add.

Now I use a quite light shade to add the final highlights into the skirt. Try not to push this too far and only highlight in small strokes.

Lastly I use a colour much darker to add in the last shadows. Often at the sides of the skirt to give it a 3D look. Zoom out and take a look. If you’re not happy with the way it looks then perhaps add some more shading, go back to some previous colours and brush over. I never use the smudge brush so the way it looks is how it will end up.

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