Cell-Shading: Week 1

I've been trying to figure out how to get into digital drawing for several months now.  It's difficult to get into a new hobby when you have so little time to throw at it a week.  The first obstacle is that I'm out of practice sketching.  After a few weeks of failed sketching attempts, I decided I'd first work on cell shading.  This required getting someone else more talented to do the sketching for me, so I commissioned Lita Tachibana through her Patreon account to do a sketch a week for me.  The first week's sketch was of my friend's character Alatyr.

(Video of the sketch process can be found here)

I found a couple tutorials on the web for cell-shading in GIMP and tried my hand at shading the above image.  The main takeaway for this week was the value of the layers in keeping the colors separate so that you can adjust them later.  Layers also made it a bit easier to be quick and reckless in places than I could have been otherwise.

I still have a long way to go with knowing where to put the shadows and highlights, not to mention how to blend them effectively.  The shadow and highlight process seems to go easily in the tutorials, but I never seem to have quite the same luck.  All in all, for the first week I'm pretty happy with the results.  I'll likely come back and start from scratch before actually using this image for anything, but it's done for now nonetheless!