Painting

Painting skin by hand was definitely one of the trickiest things for me to try to learn. I would say the most peculiar part of hand painting skin was balancing the technical and artistic aspects. Due to the sheer amount of information in human skin, you generally need quite a few layers which makes it really hard to stay in that artistic mindset because you are constantly forced to switch from layer to layer to edit certain information as well as determine the organization of new information for later use.

To start out painting the skin I carefully picked a base skin color. Once I was mostly satisfied with it (it doesn’t have to be perfect at first, I ended up tweaking the saturation later on), I picked a series of purples, reds, yellows, and browns that complimented it and stored them to my swatch layer. The highest visible layer on my layer stack was my swatch layer, which held all the foundational colors I was using for the face. Any colors I used, later on, were generally derived from these.

I started with a brown/yellow layer that sets the base skin, and then added a layer for red/purple/pink areas; I did the lips and eye area in separate layers for more control. As I moved up the stack I used lots of yellows and browns tiled over with a low opacity to break up the skin tone. For the pores and micro details I used a concavity map as a layer mask and painted over with a mixture of red and brown depending on the area. From there on out, I added blues and reds as I saw fit. By the end, the layer stack was very messy but the fine-grained control of information was very useful when doing small iterations.