Cell shading is a simple shading technique that has been used in almost every single anime known to man. I'm not sure how to explain it myself, but basically, it uses one tone of shading for the whole picture.

If you don't get what I mean, load up your photoshop (or whatever art program you have that allows layers and opacity) and make something really simple, like a sphere. Use at least two different colors. Make a new layer above the layer with your sphere on it. Set the opacity of the new layer to 45% and pick black as your color. Now color the black over the sphere like you where shading it. Viola! Cell shading.

I hope that I made any sense at all. I'm not very good at explaining things.

Now I am more confused-- your explanation made perfect sense, but the tutorials and such that I found didn't say anything about using a single color, in fact several did the opposite and used a different color gradient for every color in the picture, which is what I did. Hmm... back to research for me! :P

Thanks for the comment, by the way. :)

Just find whatever works for you.

I think it worked quite nicely...

V.

Thanks! I'm rather pleased with her myself.