how do I paint realistic skin this is one of the most requested topics from our students
especially if they're designing a character or painting a portrait in this video I'm going to
show you how to render natural and luminous skin tones by painting some flesh spheres there are
many different ways to render skin most can be simplified into two different styles soft and
cel shading soft shading is great if you're going for a realistic look that is more seamless and
blended cel shading is great for a more stylistic look by using harder edge shadows with little to
no blending at all here's the thing right people are like oh I need a separate tutorial for how to
draw dark skin no you don't the principles remain the same alright so let's say we've got some skin
we've got this one here let's say maybe we've got a shadow going on real quick and a huge shift down
to make it colder the colder color is towards red so I'm just going to add a little bit of a shadow
right here what I'm gonna add though is something called subsurface scattering which is a little
red edge to all your shadows this is not going to be as intense in every single aspect of the body
the places where it will be the most intense are your nose your ears your fingertips and your chin
subsurface is important so let's say we've got our little subsurface bit here notice that I am using
a textured brush skin looks a lot better if it is not perfectly smooth what if my skin is perfectly
smooth like plastic that I would think that you're a men in black or an SCP worker another fun thing
you could do is if you have flesh it's nice to add a little bit of bounce light you can use any
color you want my go-to just so happens to be blue because blue is a very common bounce slight color
but like you can use anything you want especially if you'll have like neon lights around you
okay so if we've kind of have the flesh orb right what we got left is we got a little
bit of highlights highlights look great as speckles if you want your nice little
highlights going in there it's nice to get a speckled looking brush to get a bit of that
texture in there it's subtle but you can see it and then you can just kind of pick a spot
for a very nice bright highlight you can also do some speckling speckling just looks a lot
nicer my comparison to just blending it in there you can even add a little bit of
that speckling back into the shadows to make it not as smooth make it a bit more porous as they
say you could even like do that like use like a soft brush if you want to go a little bit more
mega realistic you can like use a soft brush and go back in here if you're doing a painting don't
start with a soft brush you're setting yourself up for failure start with a hard edge and then
learn how to render with a soft edge afterwards flesh orb so you got something that kind of looks
like this now if we're working with dark skin very very similar I'm gonna choose a shadow color make
it cold because this skin is darker the shadow will not be quite as intense by comparison to the
lighter skin this again is just a theme with all darker objects if you have a darker object it will
adapt to the shadow a lot less you will however still have your subsurface scattering bring
it closer to the red and you've got your little subsurface scattered band blend these bad boys in
and then let's pick a blue for our nice little bounce light back here makes everything look a
little bit nicer to add a little bit of texture to that so it's not so perfect I'm gonna lean
the lightness towards yellow as I bring the highlight to this skin notice that it looks
like a highlight I am not changing the skin tone fleshy notice what this is on the dark
skin compared to the light skin because that's color theory things that are darker are more
susceptible to Highlights things that are lighter and more susceptible to our shadows that is just
a fact so with the celled one we're going to use the multiply layers now so I'm going to choose my
shadow color which I'm going to keep like this with the edge of it let's say that I wanted my
subsurface scattering what I'm not gonna do is I'm not gonna just make the entire edge one straight
line like this what I'm gonna do I'm gonna have it so the edges are a little bit thicker gets thinner
as it's in the center and then thicker as it goes up to the edge give your line some variation don't
make them all exactly the same thickness it's going to make it awkward looking I'm actually
going to blend it in just a little bit as well because I think that cel shading always looks
a little bit better if it's just slightly blended you can always have it so it's like not like that
you can just have it so it's just a sharp edge totally cool too I personally just really like
that sort of the slightly blended and then just a little bit of an edge here for our bounce light
again what I like to do is I like to blend it in just a little bit so that's what I'm gonna do if
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so we're gonna make it kind of look like that and then our highlight in
this case what I'm going to do is I'm going to pick a slightly lighter color
give it something like that and then just a sharp little point like that
let's lighten this a little bit celled a little bit easier so let's do the same
thing with the dark orb again our shadow not gonna be as crazy not as intense as it is on
the light skin because that's just how it is these values are closer together in range so
they're not as intense and let's add in our subsurface let's say that I just wanted to
keep the sharp edge for this one let's say that I didn't want to blend this one in at all just
so that we have both options for that so let's keep this one just sharp edged for
everything so let's say we have a little bit of subsurface there we've got our highlight
skin with cel shading does not have as much texture as skin with painting because cel
shading is meant to simplify we don't really want to make it crazy cel shading is all about
shapes it's not blending so you can sell that just like this there we go celled
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