Hey, thanks! Steal to your heart's content, just be careful with the mistakes that i'm sure i made on those lol
I only used the base photoshop soft brush on it, i'm not a big fan of the smudge tool.
Short answer is yes, i mostly use the lasso to isolate and render.
Looong answer is: i apply the shadows mostly by controlling the size of the brush, did a little jpeg to illustrate how i approach render.
To show how i apply it tho, first i start with a rough sketch.
Make a Flats layer, add different shades of gray for each piece of clothing (nothing too extreme, try to stay within the middle"ish" grays). Lock it, make a copy and hide the copy. The hidden copy will be used to select the piece of clothing you rendering, using the good'ol Wand Tool. The rendering itself will be done on the visible Locked flats layer.
When starting to render, i like to roughly map the shadows.
Then i roughly map some lights too.
Then just render using shades of gray and putting some pure white/black bits here and there to make some contrast , go until you're satisfied with the result. Color picking tool is very important here, as well as the pressure you put using the pen.
If i had to describe the process, it is basically a tug of war, always adding lighter and darker shades and going overboard then fixing it lol It's truly a test of patience.
When you squint, it kind looks a bit like the reference, a bit muddy, but good enough to my eyes lol
