Pencil: first I make an opaque white layer and sketch the pencil on it. This image is unusual in that I am modifying some ink from another drawing, that is shown faintly here (it is from the growth video but with some movement and scaling). My pencils normally look like the girls on the right. Also the football pads needed a lot of rework.
Ink: A new opaque white layer is made, the pencil is reduced to 20% opacity, and used as a guide to carefully draw the ink layer. Above is the result, with the pencil removed. Sometimes I leave the pencil in about 10% to get a hint of spontaneity to the image. The ink layer is set to Multiply when done.
Color: This is the most tedious part. A new transparent layer is added under the ink, and painted with all the pressure effects turned off on the brushes. I use the magic wand to select the large areas and fill them. If it "leaks" then first paint some dots to plug the leaks, then try the magic wand again. Smaller areas and fixes are done by setting the brush to "beneath" so you can paint right over previous filled stuff without messing them up. Turn off the ink and look for holes and paint them in (otherwise the smudge brush in the shading will work poorly).
The colors are chosen looking at the background but are very bright, as the shading will darken everything a lot.
BG: There is at least an opaque bottom layer that I paint by using gradients. More recently I have been making much more elaborate drawn backgrounds, such as this locker room. These are done by making an ink layer and a either colouring the bg or making a colour layer between it and the ink, the same as the main drawing.
It is useful to make the background before doing the colour fill so you can judge the colour. However you have to stick a blank layer in between so that the magic wand works.
This also shows some shadows of the characters painted in (that was a mistake).
Here is the result before the shading step. As I am doing this pic by request I thought I would post it to get any comments or changes. I did alter it to make his thighs and chest bigger. Make sure you have made all changes to the ink you want as it is hard to fix after shading.
Shading is done by making a new layer above the colour layer and below the ink. Above the result is shown atop gray (however I paint looking at the final image). I then use the select-by-colour tool on the colour layer to restrict the painting to areas, then paint the shading layer (make sure you change layers after doing the selection, my biggest screwups have been painting the colour layer).
I shade with fuzzy brushes (not the airbrush) with opacity set to about 30%. For each colour area I paint the dark first, then erase where it should not be, then white highlights, and use the smudge tool to smooth it out. I then add sharp details like sweat and hair with a smaller brush (sometimes I put the sharp details in a higher layer). It is useful to use a small smudge brush with no region selected to smudge out the sharp edges of the regions when done.
Shadows on the background can be done here too, just select the transparent area and paint. I screwed up here and painted the wrong layer.
If you want to do special effects like cloth filters, you need to get the region opaque. I do this by selecting the colour off the lower layer, then filling in the region using "behind".
Resulting image can be seen above.
