Drawing ships from scratch

[ScottishPingu]

Howdy,

I want to start trying to draw ships from scratch but wanted to see what others peoples process was.

I was thinking of doing the outline, then filling with block colour, and the applying the shading. I think I've got a way to maintain the light source for doing shadows.

One thing I've noted is that the Original ships seem to have grading to the colours. How do people replicate that?

Any pitfalls to avoid that seem obvious when you've done a few?

Cheers
ScottishPingu

[SallySpartan]

From my understanding, each ship has a couple pallets (I think about 7 actual colors per pallet) that should help with the shading. I know after the shading is done there is some effect you apply to it to make the gradient like effect you talk about, I just haven't done that yet on any of my ships. However it is after the entire thing is sprited.

I think your order of operations sound about right. Outline, fill in with the shade that in general will fill out that space, and then fine tune and actually shade it.