The secrets of painting skin in photoshop

Firstly, the title to this post is deceptive. There ARE no secrets. It’s just boring and straightforward, no hidden tricks, no secret societies, no special handshakes.
But it did sound good didn’t it?

My skin tones and textures are something people compliment me on a bit, and I often get asked what I did to get those results. So, to finally answer that question (and in a manner better than ‘Uh…paint it that way?’) I present:

My list of things that I do when I’m trying to paint the skin to be the good skin, you know, and not the bad skin, when I am painting, like I often do, because it’s my job.

Told you the original title sounded better!

Start Messy

When I start painting somebody, I’m messy. I use a big round brush at medium opacity and I have at it. The edges aren’t crisp, it’s all overlappy with some parts opaque and some parts see through. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care. Go nuts.

Stay Messy

As I refine, I do so with a variety of messy brushes. Skin is really actually seriously disgusting when you look at it, so you need to go messy.
I use big, patchy brushes to throw in areas of shadow and highlight, sometimes leaving pretty harsh edges between the two. When refining and adding more ‘structure’ to the skin (say, bones in a hand) I use a brush that mimics a natural bristle brush, and I move quickly. My strokes are random, erratic and messy, and if I make a mistake I never erase – I just paint on over it.
Then, as if that mess isn’t enough, I add texture with all sorts of random speckly brushes. A great pace to start with some skin texture brushes is here. Dave Nagel has a seriously wonderful assortment of photoshop brushes, so if you’re not into making your own (and even if you are) check them out.

Your skin wants speckles, age spots, pock marks, heavy wrinkles and all sorts of random colours. Like I said, real skin is pretty damned disgusting (hence the booming makeup business, designed to even our naturally alarmingly patchy skin tones) so I resist the temptation to get all smooth and perfect on my paintings. It only ever winds up looking plastic. Messy, scratchy, patchy, grungy brushes are your saviour.

The image below shows what I mean, and gives a pretty good idea of just HOW messy I am in my paintings. Here is doesn’t look so bad, but click on it for a larger version and you’ll see what I mean.

Don’t paint what you think you see

It’s so tempting when painting skin to paint what you think skin tone looks like. I find when I do this, I’m almost always way off base, so to combat my natural inclinations, I pick random crazy colours and try to throw them all in there, usually in a very low opacity.
One of the best things I ever did was to take a bunch of photos without flash in all sorts of random lighting conditions, take the photos into photoshop and start clicking my eyedropper everywhere.
Turned out that shadows weren’t brown or just a darker skin tone, but deep vivid red in this one, green in this one, blue in this one, purple here, yellow there. Highlights were apple green, light blue, vivid peach and all sorts of other crazy colours, depending on the lighting.

Using my eyedropper, I made an image of random colour blobs using what I had selected in each photo and saved the image to use as palette reference in future, labelling it (eg: ‘pale skin in direct sunlight’ or ‘tan skin on gloomy day’) so I could go back to it whenever I lost my way in my paintings.

On that note, I usually work with the rule that if you have used the same colour on your brush for more than 10 seconds, something is wrong.
I use my eyedropper to change colours constantly. When the constantly switching to eyedropper starts to wear the text off the ‘Alt’ key on your keyboard, you know you’re doing the right thing.

Skin is a fabric, not a solid

I don’t mean this in a ‘it puts the lotion in the basket’ type way, but I found it important to remember that skin is draped over our frames. We’re not solid plastic; we sag and bag and droop with age.
It’s also semi-reflective and semi-translucent, and in varying degrees based on skin type. For instance, pale skin isn’t so reflective, but it’s pretty translucent. I imagine it as a more sheer fabric, while darker skins are more reflective, but less see through.

When I started looking at skin in this context, as something that hangs over us, suddenly everything made a lot more sense to me, and my brushstrokes seemed to take a much more natural path when painting a figure.
I know it sounds odd. But try it.

And that’s it! This is the entire small collection of things I know about skin. Enjoy, and happy skin painting!

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Tags: art, Art and illustration, something to think about, tutorial, walk through, worry