>>4081921I tried to demonstrate what I meant. Note I can't draw like Tim Lochner, but this should convey the idea.
Step 1: pick a flat color--Tim likes to start very bright (it's reading 98/100 in Sai) for the skin and drop the luminosity by about 20 for the shadows.
Step 2: Mask the flat color so when you paint on it, nothing spills outside the lines. He used clipping groups to do this, but there's other ways.
Step 3: Apply shadow with a soft brush. I used an ordinary soft round (airbrush) as well as Sai watercolor for mine, which blends. You could just use the blending brush. Blending is necessary for this style. Tim knocked that saturation way down for the shadows in this case, but he doesn't always. Pay attention to the form when applying shadow. The shadow lightens ever so slightly as it wraps around the thigh to the lighted area.
Step 4: Apply red to enliven the skin. This requires you to bump the saturation back up. Not too high, subtlety is key. The value should be around the same as the shadow, maybe a bit higher. The terminator requires a slightly harder edge if you want it to stand out.
Everything else from the clothes to the hair is fundamentally the same. He's shifting hues, saturating and desaturating, applying values consistently and simply in an organized way. All to subtly draw your eyes to areas of interest. A good way to analyze it is to pick a layer and figure out what it's doing. If the effect is too subtle, lower the brightness or raise the sat to max, select-all and move stuff around to see how badly you mess things up, etc.
