FinalSoraRiku's avatar
Comment on art, first and foremost - I too remember the transition from pure black shadows to coloured darkness.  It's served me well to make the shadows the same colour as whatever they're on, but darker and, most importantly, more saturated.  Take the original colour, drop the brightness a bit, up the saturation.  Haven't found anything better yet, at least, though I still use pure white highlights (should probably learn coloured lighting one day).  The shadows on her fur are really light, too, but most of it's really nice.

...got kind of art critic-y there for a moment.  I don't get to talk about the results of my art endeavours very often.

Anyhow, Catherine's certainly worthy of her own study, given how unique her figure is.  It's really a shame we don't have any other female characters, at least that aren't human - it makes it really hard to have a frame of reference for dimorphism and whatnot.  The combination of height, figure, and especially eyes areis kinda weird.  You can handwave her really feminine figure for the most part by just saying she's one female cat out of many and it doesn't really tell us that much, but different eyes entirely is just odd.  Never really knew where to go with that, honestly.
NipChipCookies's avatar
The light shadows on her fur is an easy fix. I did all my shading on the same multiply layer so the shading will look different depending on the base colour. On white it's a lot more lighter so it's a matter of shading white fur on a seperate layer with higher opacity next time around.
FinalSoraRiku's avatar
I know many do it successfully, but I never managed to be pleased with a "one size fits all" multiply layer or anything of the sort.  At this point, I just give everything its own completely opaque shadows, since there are too many variables with all the different textures and whatnot.  The only exception is anything that's near-zero saturation, for which I just use pure black of varying opacities.  Just how I make it work, though.