I am not a teacher

I am not qualified to do this.

Today was spent doing other work that’s not ready to be shown yet, so here’s the breakdown of yesterday’s stream, complete with commentary.

Here is the lineart, almost cleaned up. Note that the face, hair, hands, feet, etc. are not finished.

I always use a light or muted color for the backdrop; working against solid white or neutrals can sometimes negatively affect your initial palette. Using a background color will influence the temperature, so choose accordingly.

I always use two colors when I start: the base and the shade tone. In actuality, the base here is very light and closer to the highlight, and the shade here is not the darkest tone, but the base tone will be derived from blending in the next step.
I roughly block out the shadows; the light source is fairly intense from the front of the figure.

Here comes the blending. This is similar to working in monochrome, except of strictly having values, there is also hue and saturation involved in the gradient. This is still very rough and fast because I am just trying to figure out where there should be hard edges and smooth transitions. Contrast isn’t my main priority here, since I don’t have all my values in place yet.

Now I identify where the darkest parts should be, and plop down the colors similarly to what I did before. Again, this value isn’t just darker, but the hue and saturation has changed as well.

Again with the blending. As my gradient becomes more defined and develops more colors, I can start to spread out the colors a bit more thoughtfully in regards to contrast

This is where some of the initial polish work starts to show up, but I am mostly jumping around the piece at this point to whatever catches my attention. Forms that were not implied by the lines are now being done by the shading instead, such as on the abdomen, arms, and legs.

I feel like the darkest value isn’t dark enough, so I try to introduce another color. This time, I’m being more subtle with an airbrush instead, since it won’t disturb the blending I’ve already done nearly as much as taking the steps I did before.

Now, I want to work highlights to make the form pop even more. I try not to go overboard with them because that will make the drawing look too uniform and strange.

Using the same techniques as before, I blend in the highlights and repeat the process again with white specular highlights to give it a more shiny look and to further develop the form.

Then I ruin everything by erasing her chest and giving her a top. Note how I added additional shading and highlights around the areas of clothing in order to emphasize that they pressing into the skin.

Though this drawing is far from complete, and I will later further push the values AGAIN, the essential form is pretty much there and just needs to be tweaked endlessly before I get a finished product.

Oh, here’s a gif, because someone was probably going to ask for one anyway