How to Paint Skin Tutorial

so many of you have asked me if I can show you the techniques that I use when I'm painting skin and how to make it look believable and alive because many times when I look at beginners paintings the skin tends to look a little bit dull or lifeless so that's basically what I want to show you in today's video so I'll run you through how I created this illustration and hopefully by the end of this video you will have somewhat of an understanding on what to do to create believable and good looking skin so here we go the first thing that I want to show you is how to use color some very basic principles that you need to follow in order to make your colors pop I prepared a color wheel up here so let me actually zoom into the color wheel here and this is really easy to understand but it's really important as well basically on the top right you see the warm spectrum and on the lower left you see the cold spectrum you have six primary colors yellow orange and red green blue and violet and basically red and blue are your primaries and orange yellow violet and green are your secondaries but let's just call them primaries because they're like the most important and so yellow orange and red are warm colors green blue and violet or cold colors and they are important because when you're painting and your your light source is warm you want your shadows to be cold and vice versa so if your light source is cold you want your shadows to be warm and this doesn't apply to every situation but most of the time this is what you want to follow I'll show you in this example over here in this painting what I mean with that so her face is in light and the light is one so I'll show you so her face has some some yellow some red some oranges so her face is mostly in warm light and her shadows down here are bluish violet so this is cold and her face it's worn and so you want to keep that in mind when you're painting if your light source is warm you want your shadows to be cold and if your light source is cold you want your shadows to be warm that really makes an image pop it's a really easy principle to understand and to apply but you need to know it and many beginners say they really don't know about these things even though they're really simple to to apply to your paintings and they make such a huge difference you don't have to fully understand that the whole color spectrum and how it works but slowly kind of ease into it and try to understand the basic rules that that apply to color so just remember if your light source is warm you want your shadows to be cold next I'll just run you through how I created this illustration and the steps I've taken and what went through my mind and why I've done certain things that I've done so in order to do that I'll just hide the the finished piece and so what you see here let me actually hide the base color so this is the original sketch it's not too too detailed it's pretty loose but it has enough information for me to get started at painting and also a quick tip is to maybe have you sketch in a slightly reddish tone it helps later on when you're painting to make it look a little bit more more natural a little bit more human so I created a base layer and this is just a flat color and most of the time it's also the skin color and so I set the skin color first before I start painting anything else and with the skin color what you want to pay attention to is that it's not to saturate it and not to desaturate it and not too light and not too dark so you want kind of a mid value something that is comfortable to look at if you look at the color wheel up here it's a pretty natural and end and nice color it's not something that's too bright not something that's too saturated not too dark it's kind of like a really comfortable mid value and so next up I like to also give all of the other things a flat color so her hair color is going to be a flat color at first her eye color her lips any accessory that she wears I'm gonna give these things a flat color so let me just show you the layers and make them visible for example here we have a lips in your eyes and I'll just keep going like this and what else is there here your pot and so I gave everything a flat color these act as my base layers and from there I just started shading and and kind of take little baby steps you don't want to go in there and expect it to be like finished in in ten minutes you want to really take it one step at a time and work towards your goal in in small steps these are the base layers and then from here I can start shading slowly and what I do when I'm shading is so many beginners what they do is they take the skin color and then they just use a darker color to paint on top and obviously that's not going to look pretty good it because it kind of looks and muddy and it doesn't look very natural and nice and it kind of flattens out the whole image it makes it look very dull so you don't want to have muddy colors and in order to avoid that what you do is you need to shift the U of the color so right here that's my skin color and then I shift use to another color and then make it slightly darker and then it looks way more natural when I'm painting so do not only use lighter and darker versions of your base color to paint it's going to look very dull so I'm gonna show you my my very first shading layer so this is my very first level of shading and it's pretty basic and right now it it looks pretty pretty terrible I would say but that's a part of the struggle so in the beginning most of your paintings will look kind of bad but you just have to fight through that phase and ya have good faith and hope that it's going to work out in the end so this is the first layer of shading that I apply and you can see that I didn't go overboard I was really cautious and and I paid a lot of attention and tried to hit the main points of shading and this is really important you don't want to go in there too fast and and do like final touches you want to see what works and what not and also when you're painting females you don't want to put in too much shade because it starts to make them look a little bit old so you want to have a nice balance between soft and hard shadows and edges and I'll get into that later but for now just keep it simple and one step at a time so what I do next is I do the same thing for all of the other layers and I just keep going like that so here's a simple layer of lighting and I had a reference for this painting and I knew that the lighting was coming from the top right so I was just adding a simple layer of lighting and then I just kept going I added some basic shading to her hair again really basic but you can see that the more layers of shading that I've added the more it comes to life so first layer of shading second layer it looks already much better than before and then the third layer of shading to her hair it makes a huge difference so as you guys can see I don't rush it at all I take it one step at a time really slowly and so what I do at about this stage is I like to start deleting parts of my sketch and so I deleted parts of my sketch and this is what's left so I got rid of most of my sketch basically and then I just kept working on it another layer of detail and the delay of shading you can see now I'm starting to shade in her nose ring and some more lighting to her hair and eyebrows and I just keep going like this now I'm adding and this one is crucial this step is crucial so right now you see that I basically only have like four different colors five different colors and her skin is looking pretty lifeless I mean the shading is is pretty nice but there's no life to it if you look at a photograph there's something about it that makes it look believable and so we need to replicate this when we're painting and this is crucial this step so with my next layer you can see that I'm adding pinks reds and and oranges and the reason for that is the physical skin on a human is just a thin layer and underneath the skin there's blood bones and and flesh so you need to let that shine through the skin and so if you look at a person's nose most of the time it's kind of orange II reddish because there's blood under the skin in the area of the nose and also the ears and stuff and sometimes you see a really bright light shining through the ears for example have you ever like took a torch and let it shine through your fingers and you see kind of the light shining through and it looks kind of orangey reddish that's because it's shining through your skin and your skin is basically translucent so it lets the color underneath show through so that's really important you need to pay attention and that's why I said you need to study color and you also need to study some Anatomy to know where to place these colors and so I added pink to our nose because underneath the nose or underneath the skin of the nose there's blood and and it's constantly running through there and so it shines through and and it's really important to know where to place these these colors so next I need to add depth to my painting because I don't want it to look flat and so in order to add depth I need to add contrast to my painting and I add contrast by adding darker colors to it and brighter colors so whenever there's contrast it adds sharpness and also depth here I'm adding darker colors and you can see that it starts to pop instantly it makes such a huge difference and also you can see there's a really bright orange it's because there's the translucent skin and the ambient light is shining through and so you see that orange colors shining through of the skin and so it's kind of like the example I said before where you take a flashlight and you shine it through your skin of the finger and you see that orange color it's because it's shining through the flesh and your skin and so it creates that orange color and it's really important to kind of paint in those those illusions and and those effects because it'll make your skin look believable so my light source is is right here it's coming from the top right this is my light source and so light is basically or shadow is basically an area where light doesn't get to and so this time I'm just adding a few more shadows and so the light is coming from the top right SSL and so you can see light right here on her eyelid but what I've done with the last layer is I added some shadow here on her eyeball because eyelid is on top of her eyeball and is throwing a shadow on to her eye and so you need to pay attention to small things like that and the more you pay attention to these things the more believable your paintings will look and the more you know about these things the the better impression you will leave to the viewer and and sometimes the viewer doesn't know what makes an image good they just don't know but they they have a sense for a good image they just can't tell what's good about it so it's view the artist who needs to create that perfect illusion and kind of fake reality with which you're painting so if you noticed this is my sketch layer up here and all of the colors are still underneath my sketch layer so I never painted on top of my original sketch and I like to do this because it means I don't I don't have to commit to anything that I'm doing yet because I still have my sketch on top of everything now obviously this doesn't apply to traditional painting so if you're painting with oils or acrylics you you obviously can't keep your sketch on top of your paints unless you have a really thin layer of paint but when you're painting digital you have the freedom of applying filters of going back of of having your sketch on top of everything so use these advantages when you're painting and now I started painting on top of my sketch for the first time it with this painting and what I do is I start adding detail to a hair and you'll see this makes a huge difference to the painting overall it just adds a big a big layer of realism to the whole painting so if I just turn it off again and turn it back on but if we zoom in it's actually not a whole lot that I've changed I just added a few single strands of hair but it's the small details that make a huge difference and I like to keep these small details until the end of my painting such as highlights I don't add them while I'm painting I add them at last so because I like to make your image really pop and those are like the icing on a cake it's kind of like the cherry on top so keep them for last and see how they make your image come to life with the next layer I'm actually showing you the highlights that I've added to her eyes and just see how much life she gets from it so it just makes it pop there's something about highlights that just finalize your image so at this point I could basically call it done I just wanted to add one more layer of detail before I was really happy but even if I showed you this painting right now you would probably like it but to me personally I needed an extra layer of detail for me to be happy and that's what I've done so the next layer is the last layer of detail and painting that I've added to this illustration for me personally to be happy and to call it quits and so this was my final step and to be honest it's really not a big difference it's just a few small edits but I needed these for me personally to be happy and so what I've done if we look at this step and the last one I edited or I I just thought it was too low so I kind of lifted it and to kind of balance it out with the other eye and I also just cleaned it up around the edges and this was just a personal thing so you need to find that at that point where you say I'm happy with this and this is different from person to person but don't get caught up in in this endless cycle of I need to keep working at this it's not good enough sometimes just call it quits and move on move on to the next painting you don't want to like get caught up a week in one painting and and not get anything else done I would rather create something that's not a hundred percent perfect but maybe 80% and I get to work on the next piece because to me quantity goes over quality when it comes to getting better at drawing so if you're working on on a client Commission then definitely want to give it y'all you want to do like a hundred percent maybe even more but when you're working on personal pieces and you just trying to get better then don't focus on perfection focus on quantity really like do as much as you can and that's to me that's one of the the best ways to get better in a short amount of time so this is basically at the end of the tutorial and hopefully you have learned something by watching this video this is my first tutorial I've never done a tutorial before I tried to teach somebody a technique when it comes to painting so I hope it wasn't too terrible and that you guys were able to learn something from it thanks for watching my video I really hope you you got something out of this and that you found it useful and as always guys I hope to see in my next video and I love you with all my heart and soul peace out

Channel: ericanthonyj

Views: 1,759,184

Keywords: art, how to paint skin, skin painting tutorial, how to paint skin tones, digital painting tutorial, painting skin tones, how to paint skin in procreate, how to find my art style, how to paint skin colour, drawing tutorial, artist, drawing, draw, art style, color theory, things to draw, how to get better at drawing, how paint skin tones, tips for drawing, how to draw, what to draw, how to draw a girl, ericanthonyj, clip studio paint tutorials, clipstudiopaint, painting tutorials

Id: 9l3uyUlu3dc

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018