Thanks, Bree!!
I learned a lot from some really awesome deviantart tutorials - I posted all three of her tuts here. Looking back at her stuff, I probably add way more hair details than I need to now... o.o I end up using the gradients as a background, doing some solid shading over that, then drawing on a bunch of strands.
I normally struggle with coloring hair, but lately I feel like I'm struggling with the other types of shading more (especially skin ).
OoOooOoOoOooo... Fantastic! Yanno, I think I may try that myself on my next project for my female toon Zaria. I think it could really help with her hair, because it's that nice bluish-black shade and I've been wondering how to pull it off right! This will be great to try! ^^
For some reason I seem to do more ok with skin than hair recently.
I use a lot of colors and then blur them together, and then the right shades make skin appear almost 3D. Pretty epic.
But I'm sure there are tutorials for that as well. I may search that myself. :3