You may not need to create shadows or any of the other little finishing details that are mentioned later. Having the colour scheme established may be enough. However, simple shadows allow you to increase understanding of the shapes and forms in your character through further definition with contour lines and modeling (the establishing of shadow and light to give the illusion of a 3D form). Additionally, they increase the quality of the presentation that the character will have for a non-artistic audience. These shadows definitely enhance the image’s impact, so including them is well worth the small trouble.

Of course, we’ve already created our character’s base colour so that it is completely changeable at any time, so why shouldn’t our shadows be just as flexible? We don’t want to be painting down any specific colours, as we’ll just have to re-paint them later if we change the base colour.

One method available is to simply chose a black, grey, or dark colour and paint some shadows into a layer, setting the layer’s blending mode to Multiply. This works – you get shadows of a variable intensity (controlled through the layer’s Opacity slider), and they’ll continue to be shady no matter what colour we use underneath. But they’re still not flexible enough.
My favorite method is to use the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer to create shadows. The beautiful thing about this is that not only can we control how dark our shadows become, we can control how saturated (rich/vibrant/colourful/excited) our shadow colour is, too.

This is a very good thing, for this reason: if you create shadows that are merely the base colour but with a lower brightness (shade/value), you will end up with dull, lifeless shadows. If you take the same colour and lower the brightness while also increasing the saturation, you end up with a much richer shadow and therefore a much healthier, realistic, and interesting image. Looking at the colour mixer, you generally want to be moving diagonally down and to the right when you’re picking your shadow colour, not simply straight down.

These are, of course, simplified shadow-creation rules. In a more developed illustration, you’ll probably want to give much more careful consideration to your lighting scheme. For the needs we’re satisfying here, though, they’ll do nicely.

1) Create a new layer set directly underneath your Line Art layer. The layer set isn’t necessary, but it allows you to turn the multiple shadow layers on and off really easily. I named mine “Shadows”, appropriately enough.

2) Pull up the Adjustment Layer menu from the bottom of the Layers palette.

3) Select “Hue/Saturation…” A Hue/Saturation box will pop up, and you’ll see your new layer located in the Layers palette.

4) Drag some of the sliders around, just to establish that they’re working. You’ll notice that, just like the Solid Colour adjustment layer, it defaults to affecting the whole document space.

5) Drag the “Lightness” slider down (to the left) a bit and the “Saturation” slider up to the right. Hit OK. Your whole image will be slightly darker and more saturated.

6) If your shadow layer wasn’t automatically created within the Shadows layer set, drag it there now.

7) With the new Hue/Saturation layer selected, hit CTRL-I. This inverts the mask, turning it all from white to black, just like we did with all the Solid Colour layers.

8) Pick a white brush and go to town. You should be able to paint “shadows” on your character. Start bringing out those contours and defining your forms. I usually start with the skin shadow. You will notice the shadow effects are more prominent over some colours than others. More on this later.

9) With some shadows painted in for the face and arms, I usually Double-Click the Hue/Saturation box back open and tweak the sliders a bit.

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