Realistic Skin Painting Tutorial
Kayla is a student and an artist coming from Canada. Enjoys rock and electronic music and can be found on deviantART.
This tutorial will guide you through the steps needed to take in order to paint a realistic human skin. As you can see from the preview image, we'll be working with a few basic circles so you can quickly grasp how to apply this to any of your drawings and paintings.
First, we'll need to start with a nice middle-tone skin color. Here we used #92675e as our base.
Next, we're going to apply some rough basic shading. The following colors are what we used to achieve it:
We used a small, hard brush at 60% opacity, since that allowed us to gradually transition the colors and quickly shade the circle.
Now, increase your brush size and continue shading, this will smooth out the transitions.
Continue smoothing and blending the colors. You can optionally use the smudge tool as well, if that helps.
Since the object is resting on a surface, it would certainly get some reflections from the light. We need to correct our lights and shadows to take this fact into consideration.
Since skin tones are not a bland light/dark variations of a single color, on a new layer, we'll blend in some pink, blue, green and yellow using a soft airbrush at full opacity.
After mixing it in, we'll change the layer blending option to "Soft Light". Here's what we get:
Notice how the skin color now looks more "alive". But then, skin is not perfectly smooth either. That's why we'll be adding yet another layer, this time using black and white spatter brushes.
Now, change the layer blending mode to "Soft Light" again and reduce the opacity so that the "defects" are not as visible.
Let's repeat the process, on a new layer, add some more spatter in black and white.
Set the layer blending options to "Soft Light", change opacity to 50%.
And now, the final step. On a new layer, fill the circle with a grey color. Then, Filter > Noise > Add Noise. Make sure "Monochromatic" is OFF, and the amount is set to maximum. Click ok, and set the layer blending option to "Soft Light" with 3-8% opacity. Here's what you'll get:
And that's about it for the basics of a realistic human skin. Now, depending your painting, you could optionally add freckles, moles, veins, detailed skin pores etc, but that could be a topic for another tutorial. Have fun!
