Let's start off with the rough sketch; getting a general feel for the three-dimensional geometry of the face, and think of the shoulder as coming at you a bit. I start off with very basic shapes, and then add the eyes, and sketch the eye indentation, nose, and mouth shape from the front of the head.

Following just outside of the scalp, we add the hair and bangs, paying attention to the flow of the hair and the effect of gravity. She has her pigtails tied back with bands that have a large orb fastened to each one.

Her uniform's collar is a bit unique and is somewhat vague from this view, but the overall position and shape of the collar folds around the shape of the shoulders and toward the back.

This works great if you are using a tablet in Photoshop. If you are scanning, you can still do this.

You can either make your original sketch in light blue pencil, or change it to light blue on the computer post-scan, depending on whether or not you are inking on paper or by tablet.

Resize your original sketch, now in blue, as large as you can.... 300 dpi is a good rule of thumb. Carefully ink over the blue lines with a moderately fine (this is up to your taste, really) black line.

The big thing here is that you switch from looking at the overall shape and balance of things - to the fine details and line smoothness.

In hindsight, I've caught a few mistakes in my original sketch that I never got around to fixing. The big one is her jaw line - it should go up higher, toward her ear.

Now, for the fun part.

Hide your sketching layer or delete it, and create another layer underneath your line work. If you're not doing this digitally, then this is where you'll have to carefully paint in the color with your brush.... and I respect your hard and tedious work for that. ^_^

Lazy people like me just select the "Use all layers" option for the fill tool in Photoshop and have at it on this layer. Pretty simple; but make sure you get a good solid fill all the way to the lines; and if you have any gaps in your line work, the color will spill out... and hunting down gaps in your line work can be a major pain. Even so, we all have to do it.

Did I mention Macromedia Flash is great for fills, because it automatically closes these gaps? Good stuff, even though I don't use Flash for artwork much anymore.

There are several techniques to use for this.

My favorite is to create another layer, and set the transparency to 44% or so; then use the lasso tool and the fill tool (with "use all layers" selected) to create a shading layer. Thanks, Doitsujin, for introducing this method to me.

The only drawback of that technique is that you get the same color saturation for all of the shaded areas, and if that makes it look "off", then try this one:

Do your shading on the color layer by using the lasso / fill technique, but select the appropriate shading color for each shading area you are making. This way you have total control over the color.

The first method is, by far, the fastest... if you are creating drawings on a tight deadline (i.e. weekly webcomics, etc)

With the shading done, the illustration may still not have that glossy anime look to it.

I have a trick that helps "shine" up the drawing and soften the lines a little at the same time.

In Photoshop, flatten your finished drawing (re-name the background layer!) and use the wand tool to remove the whitespace around the drawing. Duplicate that layer and use a Gaussian Blur so that it looks somewhat blurry, but still distinguishable.

Set that new layer's blending mode to "Screen", and use the Curves to make the dark areas very dark, but the light areas should stay the same. That should make the brighter areas glow a bit, so that the image appears softer, and often it will look brighter and more colorful.

With your finished drawing, a suitable background should be added to the panel.

I re-use backgrounds quite often if the panel exists in the same general area; but I'll zoom in / re-position / blur the background art so that it isn't exactly the same. This saves time and allows me to do far more detailed backgrounds than would otherwise be possible within the time available.

This is a panel from page 65; and it is the first time we see Pleione in color. Again, this finished drawing has some flaws that I probably won't go back to correct, but will note for future reference.