I’ve been practicing more intricate skin tones for the past week. If you spend your whole life looking at photographs, you might not realize how much color is on skin. Much of the color found in skin is not picked up by the camera, but you can put these colors in a painting. When setting out to create skin tones, most artists do not realize how many colors are in the skin. Besides the pigmentation, there’s redness in the cheeks, blue or green in the chin, sometimes yellow in the forehead and other colors that end up on the skin because of reflection and colored light.

I decided to start doing what a lot of artists recommend to see how it works out. Lots of artists tell you not to paint on white and to instead pick a dark color, usually grey or a dark shade of the most dominant color in your picture. I picked grey for now and I will try the skin tone next time. So far, it makes it a lot easier to see what you’re doing as you add progressively lighter and lighter colors. Plus, for me it feels easier to control how much you shade different parts when you shade this way. For digital art, just fill the background with whatever color you want to put in the background. For traditional art, just pick a canvas that has the color you would like to have as the base. Of course, none of this is 100% necessary and you can always just use a white sheet of paper when following this guide.

To sketch the character, choose a color that is light enough to show up on the dark background, which is the whole point of using a dark background to begin with. These lines will show up very well.

After getting the lines out, you can now start to throw down the colors. Start with the darkest colors. On the face, the areas that are the darkest depend on what you’re drawing. For this character, the darkest areas will be under the eyes, between the nose and the cheeks, under the nose and under the mouth. If you’re drawing a neck, the area under the chin will be darkened too. With take one, don’t worry so much about getting it accurately. Just get the general area colored because you can always color over areas that need to be tweaked.

Next, start laying some more shades on the side of the nose facing away from the light source, the edges of the ears, the chin, and near the darker shades. When two different shades come together, blend them at the edges.

Now select the lightest skin color. Add highlights to the middle of the nose and the cheeks for this drawing. Where the highlights land depends a lot on the light source, but for an area where light is all over, those areas get the most light.

Cover the areas that you haven’t covered on the face yet with the base color that you would like the majority of your character’s skin color to be made up of.

Now start throwing down those special colors over the character’s face. Put reds in the cheeks, yellow on the forehead and blue or green on the chin (or nothing). For some characters, these colors are stronger than with other characters.

I finally got sick of staring at vacant holes where there should be eyes. You can do that too by simply filling in each eye with a colored circle and a color that is not pure white, but close to being white.

Then, start shading all around the eyes. Shade under the eyes and above the eyes lightly. Shade between the eye and the eyebrows very lightly, though strongly enough so that you can see the shading. Add a little yellow to the corners inside the eyes. Add highlights on the tops of the eye sockets.

Now, start adding details to the irises. Add black circles in the center of the irises where you want the pupils to be. Draw one or two rounded white objects on the eye to indicate the glare, where the light bounces off of the eye. Off of the pupil, start drawing lines, alternating between short and long lines. Surround the iris with a darker version of whatever color you used.

Next, move on to the mouth. Mouths are really interesting in that they come in different sizes and different people have lips of different thickness. This character is an Asian girl with tiny lips. The top-middle part of the mouth has a little dip, which sorta reminds me of an M. The lips are thinner near the corners of the mouth and thicker near the bottom. The lips also tend to curve inward on the sides on the lower lip. Some bottom lips are wider, while others just seem to dip. Painting lips can be very fun and lips can be very, very intricate. Some lips are very reflective and there are also nice little folds that curve outwards and travel upwards and downwards. I decided to not play around too much with the lips until later.

For the ears, draw the basic shape of the ear. The outer edge of the ear has a fold on the top half that wraps around the ear until it reaches the middle of the ear. The ear canal is drawn using shades.

When drawing the hair, I happily discovered that the whole laying down darker tones helps with the hair in Photoshop because you can still see the light strands when you create a new layer and set it to multiply. I guess using that method is better for darker hair. Anyway, regardless of whether or not you’re using traditional or digital methods, fill in the hair with the mid-color. That’s a color that you sorta pick at whim, since color shade really depends on lighting and whatnot.

This is only part 1! More details will be added soon.

Alex

Tags: Blending, Color, coloring, darkness, eye, face, forehead, hair, high, highlights, iris, Lips, shading, strands, Tones