Painted sketches from the shape

One of the important skills for an artist is learning to think in shapes, to notice the structure of shadow shapes and to work with complementary colors. For that you need to practice not only line sketches but shape sketches as well.

When you’re sketching, watch that the edges of the form aren’t equally smooth everywhere, or the sketch will look too monotonous. That’s why I use the smudge tool quite a lot while working — in Procreate I use the brush attached below with it, and I try to keep the radius fairly large.

On color: in sketches I deliberately move away from a uniform skin tone toward complementary colors. Here, for example, the base is a grayish red together with a cool grayish green (the green should be grayer and the red more saturated). And by that same complementary logic, when purple comes into a drawing, you need to put something ocher somewhere nearby. Next to an orangey note you need a gray-blue, and so on.