I'd love to share my methods, but I find it hard to put into words, as colour selection, for example,is something which I kind of just 'do'. I don't put too much conscious thought into it. I'll try to explain as best I can, though.
First off, management isn't really an issue for me. Colour conservation, on the whole, is something I try to exercise, and so I arrange my palettes accordingly. Take the absinthe drinker, for example. I knew I needed greens for the bottle, peachy tones for the skin and some neutralish colours for the clothing (thus, the initial palette choices). My Caucasian skin ramps usually range from yellow (highlight) to purple (shade) with a peachy tone in the middle, for obvious reasons. In this case, I made the darkest skin tone a rather neutral purple, and the next darkest an almost brown so that they could be reused to give the impression of a brownish suit. the highlight colour is a rather desaturated yellow, as that lends itself to being both a highlight for the skin and the bottle (yellow acting as a lighter tone of both green and peach), and worked as the colour for the undershirt.
I then decided to add some ambient lighting from the "fairy". The main green was a bit harsh, but the lighter green I made almost gray so as to act as a midtone between the green and purple, adding the darkest (and slightly less saturated) green afterwards, as the 'main' colour of the ambient light. The neutral green also anded up being gray enough that it could be used as a shade on the undershirt, thus more palette unification (if you can call it that).
As for the darkest, darkest tone (a desat purple), that was pretty much an arbitrary choice. I could have just as easily gone with a dark dark green, with only slight changes to the feel of the piece. Either way, I hate using pureblack, so I generally choose a desaturated dark dark shade of a colour that already exists in the piece.
I'm horrible at explanations. If that was garbled, incomprehensible or just way off what you were looking for, let me know and I'll try to explain myself better. Either way, I'm flattered that you are interested in understanding my process. Just for interests sake, I feel like mentioning that I rarely (if ever) work from line art. With all of these pieces, for example, I drew, say, the face/head, coloured it, added maybe the torso, coloured an arm, drew a leg, erased part of the face, recoloured the arm, drew another leg, scrapped the whole body, etc. Very disorganized and process-less.
I'd be interested to know how other people go about it. Maybe I'll start a thread over in the general board, unless one already exists and I'm missing it.
