Methods for Painting Realistic Skin Tones
In this tutorial, we'll cover tips and techniques that will help you create realistic skin tones. Software required: Photoshop CS6.
What you'll learn
In this tutorial, we'll cover tips and techniques that will help you create realistic skin tones. We'll begin this process by mixing a variety of skin tones to paint the head of a light skinned Caucasian female. From there we'll take a layered approach of building up our skin tones by applying a base tone first followed by blocking in mid-tones, shadows and highlight tones. As we progress, we'll focus on specific areas of the head and face and explore how the skin's appearance varies throughout. Finally, we'll finish by adding some final details to our skin tones to tie everything together. As we'll see, in addition to tones, there are several elements of skin to consider such as reflection and translucency. Throughout this series of lessons we'll also discuss a few common mistakes that can be made when painting skin tones. While everyone's skin is different you will be able to apply this method of painting skin to your own projects. Software required: Photoshop CS6.
Table of contents
About the author
Kurt is a design tutor at Pluralsight. Ever since he could hold a crayon, Kurt has been in love with drawing. Apart from his dedication to training artists at Pluralsight, Kurt has an extensive background in illustration. He has previously worked for a book publisher, as well as Rhythm and Hues Studios. It was through his extensive industry background that Kurt learned the way of the Wacom, and that the Pen tool is truly mightier than the sword. Along with creating beautiful 2D illustrations,... more