How to Paint Skin Tutorial

Many of you have asked me if I can show you the techniques I use when

paint

ing

skin

and how to make it look believable and alive because a lot of times when I look at beginner

paint

ings the

skin

tends to look a little dull. or lifeless, so that's basically what I want to show you in today's video, so I'm going to explain to you how I created this illustration and I hope that by the end of this video you understand something of what to do to create something believable and good. looking for the skin, so here we go, the first thing I want to show you is how to use color, some very basic principles that you should follow to make your colors pop.

I prepared a color wheel here so let me zoom in on the color wheel here and this is very easy to understand but it's also very important basically on the top right you see the warm spectrum and on the bottom 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 are the more important, so yellow, orange and red are warm colors, green, blue and violet or cold colors and are important. because when you are painting and 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 does not apply to all situations, but it does apply to most of the Now this is what you want to follow.

I'll show you in this example here in this painting what I mean by that so that his face is illuminated and the light is one, so I'll show you so that his face has a little bit of yellow. a little bit of red, some orange, so his face is mostly lit by warm light and his shadows down here are blueish violet, so this is cold and his face is worn out, so you have to keep that in mind when you are painting, if your light source is warm. you want your shadows to be cool 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 apply, but you need to know it and many beginners say they don't really know it. I don't know about these things even though they are very easy to apply to your paintings and they make such a big difference that you don't have to fully understand the entire color spectrum and how it works, but little by little you get familiar with it and try to understand the basic rules that apply to color, so remember that if your light source is warm, you'll want your shadows to be cool. Below I'll explain how I created this illustration and the steps I took and what happened. through my mind and why I've done certain things that I've done to be able to do it, I'm just going to hide the finished piece and what you see here, let me hide the base color, so this is the original sketch.

It's not too detailed, it's quite loose, but it has enough information to start painting and also a quick tip is to maybe have you draw in a slightly reddish tone, this helps later when you're painting to make it look a little bit more natural, a little more human, so I created a base layer and this is just a flat color and most of the time it is also the skin color, so I set the skin color first before I start painting any other thing and with the Skin Color what you have to pay attention to is that it is not to saturate it or to desaturate it, neither too light nor too dark, so you want a medium value, something that is comfortable to see if you look at the color.

Up here, it's a pretty natural, final, nice color, it's not something too bright, not too saturated, not too dark, it's like a really comfortable mid-range, so up next I like to give all the other things a touch as well. . flat color, so your hair color will be a flat color at first, the color of your eyes, your lips, any accessories you wear. I'm going to give these things a flat color, so let me show you the layers and make them visible, for example, here. we have lips on your eyes and I'm going to keep it up and what else is here your pot so I gave everything a flat color these act as my base layers and from there I started shading and taking little baby steps you don't want to go in there and expect it to be done in ten minutes you really want to take it one step at a time and work towards your goal 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 I many Beginners take the skin color and then just use a darker color to paint over it and obviously that won't look very good. because it looks a little bit muddy and it doesn't look very natural and nice and it flattens the whole image, it makes it look very boring, so you don't want to have muddy colors and to avoid that.

What you do is you change the U of the color so here that's my skin color and then I change the use to another color and then I make it a little bit darker and then it looks a lot more natural when I'm painting so not only you use it. The lighter and darker versions of your base paint color will look very dull, so I'm going to show you my first layer of shading, so this is my first level of shading and it's pretty basic and it looks pretty pretty right now. Terrible, I would say, but that's part of the struggle, so at first most of your paintings will look a little bad, but you just have to fight through that phase and have good faith and hope that in the end it will all work out.

This is the first layer of shading I applied and you can see I didn't overdo it. I was very cautious and paid a lot of attention and tried to hit the main points of the shading and this is really important. I don't want to go in too quickly and do the finishing touches, I want to see what works and what doesn't, and also when you're painting women you don't want to put too much shadow because it starts to make them look a little old, so you want to have a good balance between shadows and soft and hard edges and I'll talk about that later, but for now keep it simple and step by step, so what I do next is do the same thing. for all the other layers and I continue like this, so here is 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 went ahead, I added some basic shading to her hair again, really basic, but you can see that the more layers of shading I added, the more it comes to life, so the first layer of shading, the second layer already looks much better . that before and then the third layer of shading on your hair makes a big difference so as you can see I don't rush at all I go step by step very slowly and what I do at this stage I like to start removing parts of my sketch, 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 kept working on it, another layer of details and the shading delay.

You can see now I'm starting to shade her nose ring and a little bit more highlighting on her hair and eyebrows and I keep going like this now I'm adding and this is crucial this step is crucial so now you see. Basically, I only have four different colors, five different colors and their skin looks pretty lifeless. I mean, the shading is pretty nice, but it's lifeless. If you look at a photograph there is something about it that makes it look believable so I need to replicate this when we are painting and this is a crucial step so on my next layer you can see that I am adding pinks, reds and oranges and the reason is that a human's physical skin is just a thin layer. and under the skin there is blood and bones and flesh, so you have to let that shine through the skin, and if you look at a person's nose most of the time, it's kind of a reddish orange II because there's blood under of the skin in the nose area and also the ears and stuff and sometimes you see a very bright light shining through the ears, for example, have you ever taken a torch and let it shine through your fingers and do you see some kind of light shining and it looks a little orange? reddish, that's because it shines through your skin and your skin is basically translucent so it shows the color underneath, so that's very important, you have to pay attention and that's why I said you have to study the color and you should also study some anatomy to We know where to place these colors and that's why I added pink to our nose because under the nose or under the skin of the nose there is blood and it constantly runs there and that's why it shines and it's very important 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 to add depth I need to add contrast to my painting and I add contrast by adding darker colors and brighter colors.

So whenever there is contrast, it adds sharpness and also depth. Here I'm adding darker colors and you can see it starts to stand out instantly, it makes a big difference and you can also see that there is a very bright orange because the skin is translucent and the ambient light shines through and then you see the orange colors shining through of the skin and it's like the example I said before where you take a flashlight and shine it through the skin of the finger and you see that orange color. It's because it shines through the flesh and your skin and creates that orange color and it's very important. paint those illusions and those effects because it will make your skin look believable so my light source is here It's coming from the top right this is my light source so the light is basically or the shadow is basically an area where the light doesn't reach, so this time I'm just adding some more shadows, so the light is coming from SSL on the top right and you can see the light here on her eyelid, but what I did with the last layer is that I added a little shadow here on his eyeball because the eyelid is on top of his eyeball and casts a shadow on his eye.

So you have to pay attention to little 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 better impression you will leave on the viewer and sometimes on the viewer. You don't know what makes a good picture, you just don't know, but you have a sense for a good picture, you just can't say what's good about it, so it's the artist who needs to create that perfect, kind illusion. of fake reality that you're painting with, so if you noticed, this is my sketch layer up here and all the colors are still under my sketch layer, so I never painted on top of my original sketch and I like to do this because it means No, I don't have to commit to anything I'm doing yet because I still have my sketch on top of everything, obviously this doesn't apply to traditional painting, so if you're painting with oils or acrylics, you obviously can't keep your sketch on top of your paintings unless you have a very thin layer of paint, but when you're painting digitally you have the freedom to apply filters or have your sketch on top again, so use that. these advantages when you're painting and now I started painting over my sketch for the first time with this paint and what I do is I start adding details to a hair and you'll see that this makes a big difference in the painting.

Overall it just adds a great layer of realism to the whole painting, so if I turn it off again and turn it back on, but if we zoom in, it's not really much that I've changed, just added a few simple ones. strands of hair, but it's the little details that make a big difference and I like to keep these little details until the end of my painting, like the lights. I don't add them while I'm painting, I add them at the end because I like it. to make your image really stand out and they're like the icing on the cake, it's like the icing on the cake so save them for last and watch them make your image come to life with the next layer.

In fact, I'm showing you the highlights. that I added to his eyes and I just see how much life he gets from that, so it just makes him pop. There's something about lights that just finishes your image, so at this point I could basically say it's done. I just wanted to add one more. layer of detail before I was very happy, but even if I showed you this painting now you would probably like it, but me personally I needed an extra layer of details to be happy and that's what I did, so the next layer is the last layer of detail and paint I added to this illustration so that I personally would be happy and leave it, so this was my final step and to be honest it's really not a big difference, it's just some small edits. but I needed them for me personally to be happy and what I did if we look at this step and the last one I edited or I just thought it was too low so I raised it and balanced it. with the other eye and I also cleaned it up around the edges and this was just a personal thing so you have to find that at that point where you say I'm happy with this and this is different from person to person but I don't.

You get stuck in this endless cycle of I need to keep working on this, it's not good enough, sometimes you just quit and move on, move on.next painting that you don't want to like. I'm stuck for a week on a painting and doing nothing else, I'd rather create something that's not one hundred percent perfect, but maybe 80% and I get to work on the next piece because for me Quantity trumps quality when it comes to getting. better at drawing, so if you're working on a client commission, you definitely want to give it one hundred percent, maybe even more, but when you're working on personal pieces and you're just trying to get better. so don't focus on perfection focus on quantity really do as much as you can and for me that's one of the best ways to improve in a short period of time so this is basically at the end of the

tutorial

and with Good luck, you learned something by watching this video.

This is my first

tutorial

. I've never done a tutorial before. I tried to teach someone a painting technique, so I hope it wasn't too terrible and they were able to learn. some of this thanks for watching my video. I really hope you learned something from this and found it useful and as always guys, I hope to see you in my next video and I love you with all my heart and soul.