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Abend86 β Skin tones exercise
Published: 2012-12-02 02:17:00 +0000 UTC; Views: 6507; Favourites: 68; Downloads: 110
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Description
So for this exercise I took as reference 3 different photos of the same person and painted them in three different skin shades to show how color can affect the appearance of a character, even whithout changing the proportions on the face.THE TOOLS
I've used maynly the default photoshop basic round hard brush. For the base tones I used max opacity and no spacing. When doing the shadows, turn on the transference option with pen pressure option in the brush menu, then use a 90-80 opacity color. Eventually, you will want to also reduce de hardeness of the brush a bit (this option is located under de brush size button)
When drawing the pores I used a custom dotted pattern brush, but you can achive the same effects with the natural brushes. Turn off the transference, give it a bit of spacing and try it with dispersion on pen pressure.
Then, for the final touches we go back to the basic round brush, with even less hardness, less opacity, no dispersion and tranference on pen pressure. But please, never go as far as 0% hardeness. If you absolutely need to blend some tones, do so using the blending brush
1.- Golden Olive: The hues don't have much saturation, there's peach and orange accents in the skin, but no magentas or violets except a bit of blue in the lids
2_ Ebony: Here the magentas, violets and deep blues are everywhere. The texture of the skin is determined from the highlights, so it's here where you want to draw the pores
3.- Porcelain: Porcelain skin is highly translucid, so the base tones are very neutral and desaturated, almost zombie like. It's the freckles and the blood circulation underneath the surface that give the skin its final appearance; so after the base tones are aplied, you have to paint what's under the skin and then even it out
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Comments: 4
Doesn't help!!!! How to do you do it do it step by step please
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No matter the tone, you have to define the areas of light and shadow clearly, the volume is applied with hard burshes and it is not until we can make out the facial features cleary that we can start smoothing the skin.
Once you have your base tone and your shadow givin you the direction of light , its just a matter of working with the intermediate values and shades until you finish you base skin. Keep in mind that skin is a really complex texture, you have to think of it in layer terms. Even in just one person it has lots of different hues depending of the thickness, blood flow etc. Thus, the areas of thick skin over bone ( f.e forehead) usually show litttle blood vessels, therefore having less reds and blues, and more stable "skin" colour. On the other hand, those areas with heavy bloodflow and thiner skin tend to show redish tones and even blues like under the eyes.Β
You'll need to use the color picker constantly in other to blend the base tones and the hints of color. One everything is more os less blended, you can move onto details such as freckles, pores or wrinkles before smoothing the skin. The highlights must be done at the very end, and in a very subtle way: their mission is to hint the reflectivity of the cornea, skin oils in the nose, moisture on the lips sweat and such. Tho Β they help understanding the volumne, they shouldn't have a volumetric treatmet on their own, or the skin will look too oily and fake
Hope that helped, skin is a really hard material to simulate correclty with digital media because you cant use the pore of the canvas or paper, but you can compensate this a lot with the bush settings. Fiddle with different hardness, opacity ans transference until you fin the ones that suit you best! ^^
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