Okay now comes the fun part shading the pic. First you want to lay down a base shade. To do this you lightly shade in the lightest color on that certain part. Don't worry about filling in every nook and cranny you just want to mainly focus on shading evenly. After that you want to get rid of all the individual pencil lines and even out the shade. To do this you want use a shade stick, or what I prefer to use for large areas is either toilet paper or tissue paper. When you finish you should have something similar to pic 1.

Then by using your pencil, eraser, and blending tool you want to start adding shadows and highlights to the picture. This is going to give the effect of muscle tone, light angle, and even hair direction. The amount of layers that you’re going to have to add vary on the pic and the detail of the picture, this pic only required 3 layers including the base layer. Also I would suggest using a kneaded eraser when it comes to realism, because you can mold the eraser to get into tight spots and for hair it can give the effect of individual hair strands simply by shaping it into a blade and erasing in the direction that the hair is going to be lying.

Finally when have the shading to your satisfaction you can start on the background by applying the same techniques. You also don’t want the background to be in focus so as to add depth to the picture, so the further away the object the fuzzier it’ll be.

Hope this helps someone and I'd like to thank Wandering_Spirit over at Fanart-Central for letting me use the request I did for him for this tutorial. I’ll post the final product so you can get a better picture of the detail.
 

19.10.2009 23:24:51 

9934 

Amadeus