I recently did a recolor of the Angel Donadak and need some critiquing on how well I did. In addition, I would like to know the basic guidelines for doing recolor commissions on Subeta. I once saw someone doing recolor commissions and I might be interested in doing some myself.

Here is a link to the recolor I made: https://imgur.com/24hxasu

So, any tips? (The difference is that the crystals are blue. Normally angel donadak have light purple crystals.)

it is very cute!!!

At first I didn't notice, but it's nice with the blue.

I think it looks pretty well done/seamless!

- I like how the pet looks with the blue crystals! However, the coloring work needs improvement. It's especially apparent when you zoom in on the picture. There's some spots, like on the right cheek and the tail, where the blue is outside of the lines. Also, most of the crystals look flat because there's no shading on them. I think you're on the right track though. c:

(I'm only a beginner with digital art, so I'm hoping someone with more experience can give a better critique.)

I like it! I had to go look at my pet to see the difference xD

Yeah, I always had a thing with going outside of the lines, even with physical art. 😆 I only know basic shading techniques such as shadow and cross-hatching I believe? I know in digital art shading COULD be done with a fade drawing tool.

My original plan was to make the recolor look more galactic-like, but I just did the crystals as a baby step. ;)

I haven't done it in years and I'd have no idea about commission prices, but I used to make recolors so I can try to offer some tips.

1. Most (all?) of the staff artists draw the pets larger and then shrink them down to 200x200 pixels when they're uploaded to the site. Some of them post the larger working size images offsite. I used to find them on DeviantArt but another site like Tumblr or something may be more popular nowadays. If the artist doesn't post their art offsite, you might still be able to get the image if you can find out which artist drew it and ask them nicely. These larger images are much easier to work with so I'd recommend making your recolors from them if at all possible.

2. I don't know what your process is for making these but since the shading is different I'm wondering if you painted over the crystals from scratch to recolor them. If that's the case, that's unnecessary. You can desaturate the image (or just the parts you want to recolor) and make a new layer set to overlay to paint a new color over the existing shading.

3. If you want to make it darker or lighter than the original there are extra steps for that. It's been years since I did this so I don't 100% remember the exact process I used, but I know making it darker definitely involved using a layer set to multiply instead of overlay. I think maybe I also used another layer set to overlay in all black set to a lower opacity like 10-30% or something like that to darken the shading more too? If you want to make your recolor lighter than the original image you'll need to mess around with adjusting the brightness/contrast on your desaturated image, but making it lighter without washing out all the lines and shading can be tricky. It is doable though; I made a white overlay for my Bloodred Cadogre and a couple other white or lighter grey Bloodred overlays for other people.

4. The first three tips were things I got from a guide on the forums years ago but this is one I figured out myself. Sometimes parts of the image will get duller shading/highlights using my recoloring method listed above, especially eyes. If something's looking a bit flat, you can try adding shading/highlights to your overlay layer following where the shading/highlights are on the original to make it pop more. For example, here's the eyes on an Angelic Kumos recolor I did once with and without extra shading and here are the eyes and open mouth I did on the recolor of my Chibi Paralix. I also once did this when the fur on a Devonti was looking a little bit flat. Here's a comparison of the finished Devonti. The one on the right has the extra highlights. It's subtle but I thought it made it a bit better.

EDIT: Just remembered. About that first one, the full size art? I haven't kept up to date with it in a long time so a lot of newer pets won't be there and some of the images I added may have since been removed, but I do have a collection of full size Subeta art on DA, so that might be useful. Just updated it with some more images for you too.

How do you desaurate an image on Firealpaca? That's the software I use.

I'm afraid I've never used FireAlpaca, but I Googled it and found this. I also found this in the Google results and that looks like it could be potentially useful too, since it shows how to use the brush selection tool to only select part of an image. If you wanted to only recolor part of an image like you did with the Donadak crystals, I think this could teach you how to select and desaturate just that part and you could probably reuse that selection for coloring over it on your overlay layer.