Hi, this is Martin, and welcome to my painting skin tutorial! I will give you a step by step on how I paint skin with tips you can use and play around in your paintings.

Base color

Pull out your sketch and pick a base color, this will be your light tone.

when picking colors for anything there are 3 things to know: Hue, Saturation and value. Those 3 things are what you should have in mind when picking a color.

For a base color pick any color you want depending on a light situation the character is in or the skin color of the character. I picked a light, mid saturated, orange color close to the reds.

Now when the base color is applied let's go do the shadows.

Shadows

Shadows are the thing that will start giving dimensions to the character, so decide where a light source is coming from to know where to put them on the skin.

 

AWESOME SKIN TIP: To make skin more vibrant and real looking make shadows more red and more saturated like shown on the color picker. Keep in mind that the darkest shadows loose a bit of saturation but still continue to go more towards red on the hue wheel

Now apply them and once you are finished blend them if necessary. To paint the lips just move the hue more towards red not only in the shadows but in the base (light) color as well

I't doesnt really matter what brushes you use but it's nice to have opacity. For this painting I only used the default ''opaque watercolor brush'' of Clip studio paint, and sometimes I lowered hardness if I wanted a soft airbrush effect on certain places.

Giving it life by adding red

AWESOME SKIN TIP: Add more redness to the skin. Good places to ad more red is the nose, cheeks, above the eye lids, also on the hands and ears. You can do it by picking a color on the face and just moving hue to red and then lightly brusuh it on. You can also use a soft airbrush and lightly add some very saturated red on those areas. Be careful to not put too much, just lightly season it like a chef.

 

ANOTHER AWESOME SKIN TIP: You can also add redness to the places on the skin where light and shadow meet. This is what happens in real life because skin is translucent and light goes through and bounces around showing blood.

Adding highlights

It's starting to look good but we are not done yet.

Skin also reflects light so it's good to put highlights on it. I picked a very light desaturated yellow and add it to the cheeks, top of the nose, and any other raised areas that would light hit

To take it even further add some rim light that comes from other directions, be it direct light or bounce light. It will give your image a more 3D effect.

AAAnd we are done! Clean in it up add more deatils here and there and woulah! Painting is finished

I hope you had fun and learned something in the process.

Until next time! Peace!