I sketched this guy a while ago and tonight I had fun inking and coloring him in Illustrator. About 3 hours. Learning from online tutorials and experimenting along the way:) Summary: Bring in a pencil sketch and dim the layer to 10%. Use a 3 pt size brush with pressure sensitivity for the linework. Because Illustrator doesn't have a rotate art board tool, do a Ctrl+A select all, then hit R and rotate until you're ready to continue (I'm used to drawing in Photoshop and Toonboom and Painter where I can rotate my artboard to capture my hand's natural gestures). After doing this a whole lot of times and the linework is basically done, select all, Expand, Live Paint Make, Live Paint Release, now use the lasso and push delete to clean up all the lines you overshot. With clean lines, select all, and use the pathfinder to combine all paths. Now, Object>Path>Cleanup. Next, draw a colored box behind your lines. Select all, use the pathfinder Merge command to flatten the lines into the color. Use Direct Select tool to select color outside of character/ negative space. Delete those areas and any other interior negative space areas. Now, use the magic wand tool and select the linework. Cut and paste it on new layer above the colors layer. Use the Direct Select tool to select color regions and fill them with rough color, grouping like-color regions as you go. After getting the flat color layer done, duplicate it. Darken all the groups of colors where you want to add shade (such as the face in my case). With the darkened face color group selected, open the Transparency toolbar and double click to the right of the thumbnail of your color region. It should create a black box/ mask and the dark face color on the screen will disappear, leaving the color of the face on the screen normal from the flats layer below. With the black mask thumbnail in the Transparency menu selected, paint white or black with the brush tool using a 6 pt brush with pressure sensitivity. White will reveal your dark face 'shadows'. Black will remove them again. To get out of painting on the mask layer, click your mouse on the thumbnail of the dark color skin image in the Transparency menu. If you want to add more shading to other color groups, do it the same way. Finally, add a few gradients, add a highlight layer on top and then let your computer (and yourself) rest. If anyone has any questions on the process, I'd be happy to explain it more thoroughly.
