How to paint STYLIZED SKIN EASY

hello guys welcome to another video today i am bringing you a highly requested tutorial on painting skin specifically stylized skin we're going to go over the techniques that i use in almost all of my artwork to color and shade skin we're also going to be going over a couple different tones of skin which is fun i've got lots and lots of requests for this video so i'm excited to finally be doing it big big shout out to patrons they're the ones who actually decided on the video this month if you are not a patron and you would like to help support and decide future content and videos plus get lots of digital rewards or print rewards if that's your jam uh feel free to pop over to my patreon and check it out yep i think that's all anything else i stream on fridays on twitch let's get started i wanted to start off with a quick little story on when i realized something majorly important about painting skin and that is kind of how the gradients work in the skin and where you paint certain colors versus other colors and that was a few years back when i actually took a trip to italy and i went to visit some museums that were full of this beautiful renaissance artwork i started seeing paintings like this and i just wanted to show you a few examples if you'll notice her cheeks are really rosy noses look really rosy but then you'll also notice kind of under her eye is more purple up here is either more purple or even red as well and then the forehead is kind of yellow and you'll notice that in a lot of these paintings the cheeks a little bit of a purplish hue under the eye notice in the fingers they get a little bit pink as well an even better form of reference than looking at paintings even though looking at paintings especially masterworks is super duper helpful and i think you should do it see what what those other artists did but also looking at real people and even photos of real people of lots of different skin tones is going to be very very important especially as you start getting more familiar and start getting a little bit more advanced in your skin tone painting technique because once you get a little bit more advanced you'll start noticing not just how there's gradients in the skin where the blood accumulates and where the blood doesn't accumulate but you'll also start noticing different reflectivities of skin it's very important to to look at photos of lots of different skin tones because lighter skin tends to be still reflective but much less reflective than like darker skin tones so you'll notice for example with this woman her um she has a pretty dark skin tone but if you were to color pick see if i can get on the right layer but if you were to color pick here this color is almost like white it's an extremely light color because her skin is very reflective and versus the highlights and lighter skin tends to be a little bit more tight and a little bit more specular so it's good things to keep in mind but first things first i want to give you a very basic map of skin tone and we're going to do that by using just this simple little portrait that i drew because this is who we're going to color is this this gal very basic skin map or heat map or tone map or whatever you want to call it is we're going to draw like a couple lines across the face for the cheeks and the nose you're gonna get this kind of red band a red like hot band across the face this is where most of the blood kind of accumulates on the chin you're going to tend to have a little bit bluer and then the eyes and under the eyebrows they are either going to be more purplish under here this depends on the skin tone it's either gonna be purple or and just to demonstrate i'm gonna bring green over here it's gonna be more green uh obviously the eyes are gonna match they're not gonna be two different colors it's just depending on the skin tone all right so don't unless there's some crazy makeup going on don't do two different tones it's just that you got to decide depending on your base tone and undertone and then the forehead is usually going to be more of a yellow the under eyes also can be a little bit bluer as well this is going to be really subtle for us today since we're specifically doing some stylized stylized skin tones let's get into actually starting to paint this character you guys i want to do a couple different um tones with you here we're going to do kind of a lighter tone a darker tone and then i also kind of want to touch on a fantasy skin color because you guys know that i draw a lot of blue characters but the basic principles that i'm going to show you should apply to any skin tone there's so many options online if you want to start from if you want to pick from a palette i mean all you have to do is google this skin tone palette for painting or you know you'll get so many options here so you have a lot of places to start from i don't usually pick from a palette it's just kind of how i work or don't work unless i'm really struggling with like a skin tone that i haven't really painted before i don't typically pick from a palette i just go with what i feel like i is a good tone for what i'm looking for let's just start out that way and hopefully i will not regret it right um so usually what i'll do is i will i will be in this range of the color wheel kind of from here to here when we're talking about like natural skin colors so i'm just going to use a hard brush to fill in the skin for now all right and i'm going to speed up this process really quick for you and we will talk in just a second once this is filled in all right we have her base color filled in just this kind of peachy color now what i want to do is i want to start layering in these tones what i'm going to do is i'm going to switch to an airbrush a soft airbrush this is how i usually work i'm going to come up here whoopsies to the lock transparency lock my skin layer i'm going to be painting on the same the same base layer no need to make a new layer just lock the skin layer and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag the tone to be more pink and i'm going to bring this over here to be more saturated and the tone of this is also going to depend on your the skin tone lighter tones are obviously going to show a lot more of the pinkish red this gradient color i'm going to make the my brush pretty big and i'm just going to start lightly brushing in because i i like to exaggerate this so i'm going to start brushing in these blushes in the ears in the cheeks and in the nose sometimes i will fill the nose on the bottom and then other times i will only fill the nose up here and it's just a style preference to be honest making the nose more red down here makes it look a little bit more like she's been out in the cold or something it's really cute and then up here just makes it look a little bit less like still gives it the red tint but just a little bit less like she's uh been out in the cold or something so again just style press preference you can play with it and see uh see what you like and then for her lips let's brush in some pink for her lips now you have like a good foundation we're gonna add a little bit extra though a little bit extra gradients um you got to be a little bit more gentle with the with with these tones than the reds in my in my experience but just giving a little bit of hint of yellow on the forehead on her neck a little bit um under her eyes or on her eyes above her eyes the words escaped me and then just a little bit on her chin get this kind of really warm skin tone um you don't want the blue to be too much at least not for the style i'm going for it's more of just kind of what it does it desaturates a little bit of your base skin color i think that's like a pretty good base sometimes it's nice actually to bring this red up into the eyes a little bit above i don't know that it would be totally accurate but sometimes it just looks kind of nice especially on a cartoon character we're gonna shade this character for her skin anyway we're gonna shade this character and then i am going to do some skin color variation so we can see a darker skin tone and a fantasy skin tone and hopefully the shading at least will basically transo transfer over so let's give her some shadows so i'm going to hit new layer i'm going to clip to layer below this is the skin layer and now the shadow layer is clipped to the skin layer next this is my my way of shading usually it's uh it you might recognize it from the webinar i did with wacom i'm going to use a hard light layer mode so i'm going to choose a purplish grayish kind of color for this the reason i like hard light is because it really lets um the color that's underneath still kind of pop through really good so up here is where my uh sunshine is gonna be coming from i'm just gonna start by blocking in with a hard round brush in clip studio paint i'm using the g pen it's kind of my go-to when it comes to blocking in the shading at the beginning there's going to be some shadows if you're having a top down light there's going to be some shadows from the eyebrows and we're trying not to overwhelm ourselves this is supposed to be a a cute stylized character so we don't want to make it too complicated since the sun is coming from the left depending on how how dramatic the angle is this side of the face might be mostly in shadow with just this little triangle for the lighting scheme if ever you're not sure about lighting just look up reference portrait lighting schemes is really good to look up to figure out how to light a face in different ways adding a little bit of shadow under her eye although i'm not sure we'll see if we keep it um sometimes this can make a cartoon character look like especially tired if they have this kind of under eye shadow or bag it can make them look like really tired or old which if that's not what you're going for you might want to um leave it out but we'll see we'll see we'll see she does look a little bit tired it's okay girl get some sleep uh all right so we have some basic shadows roughly blocked in now what i'm going to do is i'm going to switch my brush over to the smooth watercolor brush so that i can soften the form shadows i don't really want to soften the the cast shadows very much so that's like shadows that the hair is causing maybe the bottom of the nose right here we want to keep that a fairly hard line but when it comes to these shadows that just form from wrapping around the features we're gonna want to soften those up and just brushing over either on the transparent swatch or with your color when you're using the soft watercolor brush is it makes a really nice blend so i'm using the transparent swatch right now so it's doing a little bit of erasing but it's mostly blending mostly blending and i like having the transparency swatch while i do this because there are places that i do want to reduce the amount of shadows so like here i don't want this shadow to be so intense between her brows i want to hint that there's a shadow there but i don't want uh yeah i don't want a really intense shadow and something that's very important i just want to emphasize again is keeping the cast shadows a little bit more hard you want them to be a sharper line for the cast shadows otherwise it starts looking really airbrushy and you don't usually want that look it's the kind of it's that that's the digital art look that people do not want is that airbrushy look so we need to make sure to keep those cast shadows looking a little bit more a little bit more sharp that also includes this line over here i'm not going to make it completely sharp but technically it is kind of a cast shadow that's happening from the nose is casting this direction this line is a cast shadow this line is a form shadow so it should be sharper on the left than on the right if you're looking for a brush that a default brush in clip studio that also has the blending capabilities but has a little bit more texture the watercolor brush is also super duper nice and i use it all the time [Music] for me what is really important when i'm shading anything but especially skin is even as i render i still want to make sure there's at least a little bit of texture in some of my brush strokes and so i'm really trying to make sure there's a combination of textures of hard and soft shadows and not just not overworking it because you can communicate what you need to communicate without uh without overworking it too much and i know i definitely sometimes over render and then it gets looking too soft and a little bit like dead and fake you know and so i try and avoid that so new layer uh clip to the layer below we're gonna take the same color we've been working with and now i am just going to hard light again and we are going to add a little bit of darker shadows you can use a hard brush or even just skip right to like a watercolor brush if you want for this one but i'm going to use a little bit of darker shadows in areas that are overlapping really tight areas like under the under the hair like really close to the hairline under the neck usually has darker shadows up closer to the neck just giving a little bit more of that depth sometimes darker in the crease of the lips so it's a pretty subtle thing but i think it just helps add more dimensionality [Music] so i think she's looking pretty good actually highlight time this is in particular where uh skin tone does make a difference because like i said lighter skin is less reflective than darker skin and usually the highlights tend to be more specular which means they are yeah the highlights tend to be a little bit tighter in lighter skin and also this changes depending on what type of makeup the character is wearing maybe they're wearing some sort of shimmery shiny makeup or maybe they're sweaty then they would be extra shiny [Laughter] but i'm just going to show you my kind of go-to typical highlight situation i'm going to try an overlay but we might we might change this and then i come up here to kind of an orangish yellowish light i guess it's mostly just a light yellow watercolor brush and i am going to put a highlight on her nose i think nose highlights are really cute i am also going to put a highlight under this lip here and here and if she's wearing like lip gloss well actually everyone usually has a highlight that kind of runs along their upper lip it would be even more emphasized if this character is wearing like lip gloss or something there's gonna be highlights on the lower lip and you can stylize this how you want it could just be one uh one shiny or if you want to kind of show a little bit of the lip texture you can show some vertical lines i usually put a little bit of a highlight under the brow just a touch just a touch and then on top of the brow as well think about like if you are familiar with um makeup and especially if you were familiar with contouring i feel like contouring videos actually would be really makeup contouring videos are really helpful when trying to decide where should i put highlights where should i put shadows on the face because makeup contouring videos um show kind of the ideal how people think the ideal placement of shadows and whatnot and tones on the face looks so it's really good reference actually to go and watch some makeup youtubers okay another place i like to put highlights not always sometimes they look a little strange but often is in the corner of the eyes and then they can sometimes run onto the eyelid a little bit you can do a really really soft highlight under this under eye the chin sometimes has a highlight how big you make it depends on your style i tend to make chin highlights pretty subtle but i know if you look around other artists you will see some people do like really exaggerated chin highlights and then sometimes in a lighting scenario i want even more light looking like it's it's casting on the forehead so sometimes i will take a soft brush and just gently brush in a little bit more light up there and even a little bit more light onto the cheek to make it look a bit more um rounded and then for the collarbone usually i have the shadow on top of the collarbone in a regular lighting situation and then a little bit of highlight on the actual bone itself i often add a little highlight on the shoulders this is a style thing 100 percent um people don't always have a highlight on their shoulders it's just kind of i don't know i got into the habit of doing it and i just kind of liked it so i stuck with it it's looking actually better than i thought this would turn out gonna not gonna lie that is how i paint stylized skin the next thing i want to show you guys is different skin tones with darker skin tones um gradients still happen but you're obviously going to see less of the um you're gonna see less of like the blood in the cheeks and stuff i mean this is art and you can still emphasize that if you if you want to it's just that the colors are going to be a bit different but i'm still going to go towards the the red but it might need to be a little bit more subtle there's so many different skin tones and so if you are ever unsure uh it's always a really good idea to look at reference for the skin tone that you are unused to drawing and i mean for me i it's it's a lot easier for me to obviously draw the skin tone that i have so pasty pale white um so for other skin tones it's it's very important to look at reference to learn how to do it we're still following this tone map so there is still going to be more yellowish tint up in the forehead but again be careful not to like overdo it you don't want to lose the base skin tone [Music] so now i'm very curious to see if the shading that we already did for this one works for this one i think it should work just fine but what's different is going to be the highlights the highlights are where things are getting a little bit dicey because highlights are different depending on the reflectivity of the skin and darker skin like i said tends to be a little bit more reflective also the color we have going on here in the overlay highlight layer is uh it's not really accurate not quite right so let's do a hue saturation and see if we can get something that looks a little bit better but we're still gonna have to change it um because these really specular highlights there's just not quite correct this skin tone so we ended up with this more like almost i guess it is still yellow but it's almost teal-ish it looks like so overlay i wanted to make sure to to uh keep in mind how you see the highlights on her face over here they are more like spread out and try making a little bit bigger more reflective looking highlights [Music] i think that's looking pretty good definitely a good foundation stylistically i might want to emphasize her um her blush and cheeks just a bit more it's not like i wouldn't say it's very accurate but uh it's definitely like what i like to do in my style is make sure that the characters have uh quite a bit of blush going on in their cheeks and their nose and everything so we're going to add more of that in for the last example i wanted to do kind of a fantasy color so i think we're gonna go with blue blue is my jam as i'm sure you guys know by now with all of my blue characters so we want to make a blue version what color blue do we want what color of blue do we want the same principles apply even though we're working with a crazy color the question though is do we want to kind of stick to this blue when it comes to the gradients or you're going to go crazy and come all the way back over here to pink and you can do either either looks fine if you go more towards the blue and purple for her blush it can look good or we can go more pink which is what i do a lot with like mist i tend to make her cheeks and everything more pink and purple and that's kind of what i like to do is mix the blue with like the pinks with the pinks and purples and so let's put on the shadows the shadows work okay i think we might need to adjust the colors though and i'm thinking i'm not really liking her base skin tone anyway so i'm going to pull up the hue saturation luminosity and just start dragging some sliders until i hit a color that i'm thinking i like a bit more um that's pretty it's looking a little bit better but we now need to dial back the pink blush and everything because it's a little bit overboard now for the shadows i am not really liking how the shadows are looking with the with this color so we're going to hue saturation lumosity for the shadow layer and i am going to adjust the hue saturation and luminosity until we get something that i'm more happy with okay so let's see how the highlights are okay so for the highlights i think we're gonna need to do some adjustments she's looking very icy right now what's fun about these tones is that there's no rules but also that is kind of the challenge with these uh these tones is there's no rules so you can definitely look at um reference of people who have done like body paint and stuff or artists and how they've done it in the past but um technically technically no matter what you do you're maybe not wrong i think she's looking all right now i want her cheeks to be more red so kind of the shadows of the darker parts of this layer i want her cheeks to maybe be a little bit more red and i want to see what the highlights of her look more like turquoise so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to edit tonal correction and then i'm going to go to color balance and here i can choose between shadow half tone and highlight let's start with shadow and try pushing it towards the red and see what we can get [Music] i think it's i think it's all right if we go with uh something like this it's definitely a fantasy skin color right when it comes to adding details like freckles and stuff it's pretty straightforward what i typically do is i will often just grab something like a droplet brush that kind of scatters uh it just scatters a bunch of little particles like this i take the particle size down and i paint across where i want there to be freckles if i have some specific locations where i want like a larger freckle or a mole or something i just hand paint it with a regular brush this is kind of the base steps that i take for shading skin you can start getting more complicated with this pretty quickly especially in different lighting scenarios you can start introducing reflected light if you have uh you know some light some bounce light going on that can make it even more interesting skin is one of those things that you can study for a long time because there's so much involved with it but i wanted to give you guys my base process for painting stylized skin and i hope that it was helpful i hope that it wasn't too complicated and that you were able to follow along and it gives you a place to start so i want to give this character some eyes so i'm going to go in and paint her eyes real quick as i put on some music so stick around to see the result and i will talk with you in just a second [Music] [Music] so here they are with eyes um now they're looking a little bit more complete except for the hair of course but anyway that concludes the tutorial you guys i hope that this was helpful again and please let me know in the comments if you are interested in more tutorials and if you appreciated this tutorial and somehow made it all the way through this very long video i appreciate you and please remember to give this video a thumbs up and hit the uh the subscribe button to my channel if you are interested in supporting these videos and other helpful content or just my art in general feel free to check out my patreon or you can also get many many digital rewards and print and sticker rewards if that's your jam i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and i will talk to you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: ChrissaBug

Views: 1,085,981

Keywords: tutorial, how to, paint, skin, skin tones

Id: 8UdJ0l08t6g

Length: 37min 23sec (2243 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021