Short summary

Hello, my name is Davis and I hope to contribute something with this little tutorial on how to paint the skin of your characters.

 

In this tutorial we will touch points such as light, shadow, brightness, texture, surrounding light, details for the skin of an old man or a being like a mermaid. And obviously all the tools and brushes that ClipStudio offers us.

 

I hope it can be useful to you.

First things first: Base Colors

The first step in painting the skin of your characters is to define the base colors and fill the entire skin area with that color. Luckily ClipStudio has a tool that makes filling easier. This tool is the "Lasso Fill" tool and is inside the "Shape" tool. With this tool we simply delimit the area and it is automatically colored with the selected color. as we see in the image below.

Second: We must define the colors for Light and Shadow

A recommendation for choosing the colors of the light and shadow is to move the base color diagonally in the rectangle of the color circle so that the color does not mix completely with the black or white. Then we proceed to create two layers: One for the shadows on the skin and another for the illuminated skin. The recommended Tool on this occasion is the "Airbrush". The result of coloring the shadow and light on the skin can be seen in the image below.

Third: Modify Textured Brush

To add a texture to the skin and not look very smooth, we are going to modify the "Texturing" brush within the "Pen" tool or we can use any other textured brush. To do this we duplicate the brush and modify it by clicking on the lower right icon of the "Tool Properties" window and within the brush form we enter "Spray Effect" and activate it as we see in the image below.

Fourth: Texturing with the Modified Brush

First we create a new layer that we will call "Texture 1" and with the new textured brush we simply choose a large size and fill all the skin with that texture. Then we apply the "Combination Mode" of "Overlay" and finally we see that the skin no longer looks as smooth as before. We can also duplicate the layer to highlight the texture, but we can also apply a "Gaussian blur" effect so that the other texture layer is not very marked.

Fifth: Brightness

The next thing is to create a layer that we will call "Shine" and we will put the combination mode "Add shine" and we simply paint the areas that will have a shine. We will also take advantage of this layer to add light on the edge to give more volume to the drawing.

Sixth: Surrounding light

To make the drawing more harmonious, we must make the skin of the characters slightly acquire color tones of the characters around them. For this we must create a final layer where we will put the "Combination mode" of "Overlay" and we will paint with the "Airbrush" but with the color of the elements next to the skin of your character. In the case of the dark-skinned young man, his shoulder acquires light blue tones of the mermaid's skin and yellow tones of his hair.

Repeat with slight modifications

Finally, all the steps are the same, only with the skin of the elderly we will change the particle size of the modified brush from 2 to 4 and we will also create one more layer to add the typical spots that appear to older people. And in the case of the mermaid we will use that layer to draw a kind of tattoos on her skin to give her more personality.

Video Tutorial