Everyone always wants to know how to do things. That's why there's so many sites on instructions. It's only with experience that you realize that instructions are only as good as you can take them just for guidelines and not for an automation process. Dolling can seem very automated at times, such as those when everyone at your Harry Potter RPG wants you to make them dolls of themselves wearing Hogwarts robes, and the quality suffers noticably in times like those. I'll share my ways of dolling, so read on and be instructed! Eventually, this may have more than just hair on it xD But that's all I feel like writing atm, so check back for additions later!
At forums, I've gotten quite a few "omg I love ur hair, it's so shiny!" comments, which means that someone somewhere liked the way I dolled hair. I used to have a tutorial on doing hair, that I don't particularly recommend reading. Although you can if you'd like.
After I got a tablet, I realized that every single piece of hair I made sucked completely using this method. It involved too much hand precision to get the dodged strokes to match precisely, and I had a mini-break down because of this. I blame it mostly for my stopping dolling for a long time.
So what do you do if you do have a tablet? Use its power to your advantage. I gradually stopped using Paint Shop Pro to doll, and graduated to Photoshop7, which I was afraid to use for years because my PSP7 methods had terrible results in PS7.
First, with the pencil tool, completely lay down the basic outline of your hair. Don't worry much yet about strands, but you want to know exactly where it will fall. Color this in by hand or by using the bucket fill tool. The colors don't really matter, so long as most of it is a medium color and saturation of the hair color. Then, grab a darker and less saturated version of that color (not *too* much darker. Just where you can see a difference) and which layer transparency locked, scribble in shadows in normal shadowy places. You're working with the big picture, so pretend you're cel-shading. Take a lighter, more saturated version of the first color, and add in highlights in highlightedy places. You don't want to make these blocks, this is where you start to get a little bit of strand definition. However, this isn't the end-all to strand definition, so don't use a color any lighter than the base color than your shadow was darker.
Now that you are starting to have a bunch of strandy hair, take the color closest to the edge, and a 1px pencil tool and taking the layer transparency off, draw in some extraneous strands, to add some neato realism.
Switch gears to the burn tool. I never remember what setting is which, so pick whichever one means the shadows don't get all saturated or medium. Medium is good if you use too much of either of the other two, to offset them xD Use a 2px brush and make some sweeping strokes, especially if it's long straight hair, over your shadow areas and darken them in real good. Switch to dodge and the one that means your highlights get saturated (or the middle one!) and still using a 2px brush, play with the highlights. This is just adding strands to the hair, so don't worry about lighting too much, although don't run the dodges up through the burnt areas xD
If the colors don't look great just yet, don't panic. However, if you can't get the highlights to obey you, or they won't follow the hair flow, now is the time to decide if you want to flood fill the entire area and start over (which is okay) or delete the layer (you are working on a new layer, right?:O) and start over.
Your hair should be perfect now, so long as you're working on a cloudy day or have a perfect source of ambient light. Grab your burn tool again, set it bigger than 2px, (we're going back to the block mentality) and make some bigger, general shadows. These are pretty much the areas that you started off shadowing, except more antialiased and pretty. Switch to dodge and make a similar brush, but not quite as big. 5px would probably work for most medium sized dolls. Run it across the strands in their brightest places to make the hair-doller-world's version of speculars (the white spots in eyes). This is the icing on your cake of doll hair, and seriously the best part I think. Make sure these highlights are soft and round and DO NOT GO OVERBOARD. Cake that's completely made out of icing is disgusting! This is one place where it is absolutely imperative that you have a distinct lightsource, else what is the point of adding the highlights?
Of course, this is really just general clothes; you can easily apply this to dresses and skirts also. I'm not sure about pants though, I still have a hangup on them as of yet.
Let's make a pretty semi-photo-realistic t-shirt for a doll! On my hippie base ^_^ Normally you would pick a doll that complements your shading style (which this is definitely not an instance of!) or need to edit it later to match, but I don't care! I want the exposure and not to have to deal with an extra base credit link!
Start by drawing you a nice little outline with a nice medium color. No need for it to be perfect, but that always helps to visualize the final product.
Fill it in with the same color, lock the transparency then pick a darker and less saturated version of the color and lay in some founding folds with a ~10px brush. In making this, I realized that my folds looked terrible and not like a shirt at all, so I turned on a light conveniently to my left and repeatedly made a corner turn to stare at a mirror that is on the wall perpendicular to my computer (the computer room used to be my sister's bedroom. You would not realize how handy it is to have a full length mirror next to your computer!) and turned back and forth looking one fold at a time. Memorize one, lay it down on the doll. I found it hard to concentrate on keeping two folds in memory at once, but that might just be me getting old 8)
Make a brighter, more saturated version of the medium color and repeat for the highlight-folds. Pretty much you use the same technique!
Once you get all that mess straightened out, comes the fun part! This mostly applies to photoshop, because I don't know how other programs handle this kind of behavior, but you're welcome to try it anyways! Select the area outside your shirt/dress/etc and fill it in with the medium color (or one close enough), invert the selection (don't deselect it!)then grab the smudge tool, make it about 40-60% strength and about 2-5 pixels wide, depending on how big the areas are.
Pretty much just take that smudge tool and go to town. Run it back and forth along long lines to soften them, go back and forth at right angles between dark and light to blend them together, run it in one direction to propogate the color further out or to push it back in to reshape your areas.
Invert selection, delete all that extra hackery crap color, then get rid of your selection, you won't need it anymore. Now we do some light-source shading. What we did before was just shape shading. Now we have to make it look like light is coming from a direction. With your burn tool, set it to shadows, about 20% strength and fairly big, 15-25 pixels. Make general broad strokes in areas that are not facing the light source or that are obscured from it. In the example, that would be the doll's left side, under her sleeves, across her clavicle and around her breasts.
Grab a dodge brush with similar settings (set to highlight, though) and do the opposite, run it in areas that are facing the light: over her breasts, along oneside of her arm, down the big fold going down over her stomach.
Now, a mediocre doller might have stopped there! But not you! You've read my Color Theory page! First we desaturate that junk. Real life isn't that bright. I think I used about a -13 and +5 on the saturation/lightness between the last example and this one.
Now, whether you like the color so far or not, open Color Balance and play with the sliders to see if you can't get something you like better. For this one, I added some darkening yellow and magenta (red) to the shadows to desaturate them away from the blue. To the highlights I added more blue and green to plus-saturate them. Often I won't do much with the midtones except move them up or down to balance the shadow/tones. I moved them all up in this one, but not very much.
the final product! amazing! The difference between this one and the last image is that I decided to show how you could take advantage of 24-bit PNG. Basically I just took the smudge tool again and smudged around the outlines to make them antialiased :p But also I fixed minor problems in the shaping of the shirt, the fold standing up at her neck was shifted to the right of the image and the empty space left behind was filled in and blended together. A few extra dodges and burns to touch up and voila. You got a shirt