Good art without shadows?

[akitsukino]

The comic Suitor Armor just came out on Webtoon recently and I have to say it’s one of my favorites so far in terms of art styles. It’s nice to see something diverge from the common anime aesthetic a lot of comics on the site have adapted. But one thing I noticed is that the character art doesn’t really have any shadows on the characters.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejv2cUGU0AA5UmJ?format=jpg&name=large
And it still looks perfectly fine.

Shading feels too time consuming to me but it feels like too vital of a part to completely skip, but here I have proof that not having it can work fine. Does anyone have any other examples of good webcomic art you like that is pretty light or sparse on shading?

[joannekwan]

This is one of my favorites!

With Great Abandon | Tapas

This one too!

Ape Yacht Kookies | Tapas

[ninjashira]

The one that comes immediately to mind for me is on Webtoons, not Tapas, but Heir's Game is one of my favorites, and the art is gorgeous.

Heir's Game

[wekanian]

Wow now that I see it, I am thinking to color my comic flat too. It will cut down time production considerably.

[AmysGames]

I'm pretty biased because I tend to cut shading in my own comics, lol.

I don't know that it works in every art style—I imagine in certain cases, it would look unfinished—but it certainly can't hurt to try it, if you feel shading is taking too much of your time.

[feuersichel]

That is very interesting! Those realy look very pretty. I think it might be the very toned down colors and nice artstyle, that makes the difference.

[siluscomics]

I don't use shading on my comics either... It's just super time consuming and to be honest, I just really love the block colouring!

[darthmongoose]

BUUZA!! doesn't really use shadows either, but instead uses very confident, characterful digital brush inking:

BUUZA!! | Tapas

If you have really good colours, just the right detail level and inks with personality, it can look really good. I find that with the style I use in Errant though, it needs a little shadow (just on skin and lighter stuff normally) and the highlight to not look unfinished, but if I worked with a different inking style, like fixed line width, I'd love to try a "superflat" look some time on a different work.

[malwdark]

I think the question is: the art will always look better with the shadows, but we don't have a shadowed version to compare when it isn't ours.
Mine loss a lot without it.

[snowy]

My weekly slice of happy. Good art without shadows but with lots of heart.

VAINGLORY | Tapas

[Siromany]

Cutting shading from my comic cuts down the time to make, but also it adds to the style. MS Paint really lends itself to flat color art, and I honestly don't considering my shading ability to be good enough to do it professionally.

I honestly think though not every comic needs to have shading. Flat color is a pretty good medium, and definitely helps when having to match colors for later pages (in case you lose your color palette.)

[skicoak]

Suitor Armor is a favorite of mine too!

I think they get away with not doing a lot of shading because they're so strong in character design, composition and have a unified concept of color theory. Not every artist/art team is gonna be able to pull that off consistently.

[Legendofgenii]

Here is another. I think they use a noise effect, but no shadows.

Forgotten Sons | Tapas

[revisionstudios]

The inking does a lot of heavy lifting in those styles! As long as it looks interesting as just lineart, it'll look interesting with flat color, too. It speaks to how well the characters are designed as well.

If you feel like your art is missing something without shadows, try putting in more lines for folds, hair texture, etc. You may also just have to work more on your stylization!

It's totally an option to skip shading or even be a little messy. You need to prioritize speed and not burning out when it comes to comics.

Here's an example of some of my work with flat color. The only "shading" I did was during the ink stage, I used black to shade under their chins and the really dark colors, then put a basic highlight on them. No other rendering beyond that, and a lot of people have said that they didn't notice it was largely just flat color until I pointed it out! Definitely made this go faster than if I had fully colored every single character.

The inks:

[artemficta]

I used to shade my comics but when I rebooted I decided to just do flat colors cause people seem to like it more XD Honestly I like it more and it's epically faster, so win win.

Ring Spell | Tapas

This is one I took some influence from when deciding on a coloring style

Phantom Paradise