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.