Do you have any tips for rendering? I'm pretty confident in my sketches and linework, but when it comes to rendering colour I always get choked up and embarrassed.

i do! i am in no way an expert, but these tips are something i’ve come to throughout my painting journey, and they have helped me create more well-rounded paintings.

1. if you haven’t already, start with familiarizing yourself with your drawing software’s painting features and capabilities. just try all the brushes yourself, play with all the settings, look up official and unofficial tutorials; you will truly be surprised how much stuff default brushes can do. there is nothing wrong with asking other artists for their brushes/brush settings, but in my experience it often prevents people from experimenting on their own. when i just started doing digital art i used to hoard PS brushes, but i never really used any of them except for one pencil brush that i eventually replaced with a brush i created myself in my preferred software.

2. always work on your entire painting evenly. never start working on details of one part before you’ve decided on and laid out all the colors/done the underpainting.

3. decide on your color values right at the start. simply put, you should start not only with figuring out the color scheme, but also which parts of your painting are going to be light and which are going to be dark. look at the underpainting below—regardless of the color and details i added at later stages, the sky remained the lightest part of the picture, which is part of what allows the character to stand out.

4. experiment with textures! physical mediums such as paints often have the advantage of naturally creating textures that are pleasant to the eye, while with digital art you sometimes might want to add your own to avoid a sort of ‘bland’ look. in the past i’ve created my own textures by painting and scanning watercolor blobs and laying them over my digital art in various layer modes.

5. try not to think of evenly colored objects, especially flat surfaces, as something that requires only one color to be depicted in art. look at the floor in this painting by Edgar Degas—our brains absolutely register it as an evenly colored surface, but in the painting itself not only does the floor shift from light to dark (because some portion of it is closer to the source of light), it also features many different hues: red, yellow, green, etc.

6. i greatly recommend at least trying rendering everything on one layer—it will help all the parts of your painting to stick together, preventing some details from looking like a cutout glued to the canvas. this tip might be more or less helpful depending on the type of art style you’re interested in pursuing, but rolling around in the same paint on one layer really unifies your picture if you’re into more 'painterly’/brushstroke-heavy styles.

7. for the same reason, take some time to read up on the subject of reflected light! then practice noticing reflected light in real life, and painting it. in my experience, fleshing out reflected light is often what takes paintings to the next level.

i hope this is helpful! please try to remember that there is nothing to be embarrassed about when you paint : ) even if what you’re doing looks silly to you, it’s not a moral failure and doesn’t make you a 'bad artist'—it means that your hand hasn’t caught up to your eye yet and you’re actively working on that. good luck painting!