lookin good :D

yay long time since you commented >:P hehe thanks!

hell of an improvement my friend. you pulled it off really well!

thankyou very much good sir! i will hope to keep going from this!

Definitely an improvement. Good work!

thankyou ^^ ill have to try a full bodied one, and a character more complicated.....=3

I'm not going to say it's an improvement at all! Your work has always had an exacting level of detail within it, that I think the digital medium would be hard-pressed to keep up with absent a tablet of some kind. The style is different, the 'smoothness' of it is more rounded, but one merely has to look over at people like Meesh to see that just being Digital Art doesn't mean 'better'.

On the other hand, holy crap. It's much better than MY first attempts to follow Mackey's walkthrough which ended in dismal failure five times before I ended up with a picture I didn't want to burn with fire. You have a lot better grasp of what you're doing than I did, and I think that's a wonderful way to start! High five for awesomeness, diodki, and you've certainly raised the bar for expectations of what you can get out of your work. :P

Inking your work prior to scanning definitely saves time at the cost of not being able to pull several of the layer-based tricks in the tutorial, but much of it still holds true, or can be shoehorned into the concept. If you figure out a way to make it work well, let me know, because it'd save me bags of time, and maybe increase my art output to more than one pic every half year or so.

thankyou it may be a small improvment digitally but in general work , luckily enough i do have a tablet, and should start useing it, which would make much more accurate chading around the curves of muscle , and indeed, its just another skill and another way of artwork :) though the digital artwork, seems to attract the eyes than traditional uses, depending on the traditional tools used ofcourse.

Thankyou, as far as better attempts, most things in the tutorial just wernt nessacary to do (which made the more complicated things..not, because i couldnt do them o-o ) when going through such as the levels adjustment some others, but at the same time following it i went with my own ideas..and had to since some things just didnt work , and i put the traditional way of colouring to the digital so most knowledge of shading was already there but ofcourse the guide helped kick it up a notch, *high fives* woop, i hope to keep going up and hitting higher bars, my next challenge is to colour a full character with more..complicated mix of colours and see what happens :P
but your bars are good and high hun and only get better ;p

well what i did when the tricks failed and just wouldnt work because it had the white of the paper, i just experimented with diffrent uses, for example the highlighting trick just..doesnt work, neither did the shading, so think traditionally, follow the steps of the guide but when they dont work, youll find useing the darker shades first everything normal worked fine for me, but it was the highlights where all i could and had to do was have the layer on normal (counteracts multiply slightly with the shading* and i used white put it one soft light, had the brush strengh quite low just to get the similar gleam in the highlights took awhile to get happy with it, usually one click and drag was sufice i think? i think you have most knowledge or alot of knowledge you should try inking manually then trying and finding out for yourself and see what works for you, and experiment with it, im sure youd be more than capable of getting the same effects without some of the tricks :)

thankyou ^^

oops in the shading bit i had it multiply not normal x3 but just useing the darker shades as if useing colouring pencils seemd to get the effect

What a handsome guy! And this newer technique you're trying looks good.

thanks hun ^^ im glad it pleases the eye :D