Working Opal and Jake Three Ways

For my minimum of one digital for the month, I decided to play with different styles using my miniature dog and bear as models.

Using a digital pencil sketch of Opal and Jake, I loaded into a separate Procreate file and worked as follows:

The first is trying to follow how BeeJayDel works his cartoon characters.  He has his ink line sketch and then creates a  layer for a flat base color where he drags and drops a color.  Then he works a layer for shadows and a layer for highlights.  His shadows and highlights are hard-edged.  One of the problems I find myself facing is where and how to place these hard-edged shadows.  He's big in shadows and conservative with his highlights.

The second is using the exact same colors but softening those hard edges of both shadows and highlights.  

The third version is painting the colors in (using gouache brush tool) rather than dragging and dropping a flat base color.  That way the illustration has texture simply by the brush strokes saving a step and additional layer using a texture brush over top of a flat base color.  I also changed the colors used in Jake (dog).

I prefer the soft edges in shadows/highlights so the middle is my favorite of the first two.  Overall, however, I prefer to paint my colors in instead of using a flat base color.