Hi! This is a tutorial on how to paint many different types of skin, although it won't be a follow-along or step-by-step, but rather more basic tips so that you can paint good looking realism, stylized art, textured skin, or smooth skin. This tutorial features:

 

Realism:

1) textured skin

2) smooth skin

 

Stylized:

1) light skin to medium tones

2) fantasy colors for skin (featuring blue)

 

And for both of these categories, I will share:

1) the importance of brushes and how to control them

2) other useful tools

3) how to use airbrush properly

4) how to copy and paste smoothly

 

Disclaimer:

you may notice the two different signatures for the pieces, but I promise these are all my art! I just have a different username and signature online for my realistic paintings (most of which are photostudies or paintings based on photos that I have changed a large portion of) and stylized illustrations.

Let's start with 1) Realism and a) textured skin.

 

This is referring not to the natural texture of the skin, but rather that you can draw skin without having to blend it and have it be entirely smooth.

 

Here, the important aspect is to choose a brush with good opacity, or you can find a brush you like and lower or raise the opacity as you like. As long as the basic shapes of the face and body are there, it's not as important to blend everything. The opacity will create an illusion for the eyes, so it still looks like skin overall, even though I did not do any blending for this painting.

 

For the brush type, if you want a textured look, it might be better to look for a brush that does not have blended edges and rather has hard edges, but I have done paintings with all types of brushes, and anything can be used, really.

 

A good understanding of the structure of the face plays an important role in this type of painting, especially since you are simplifying structures.

 

Notice also the change in detail from the face to the neck. Areas that are less important can be more vague and rough, and areas that are the focal point can have more specific colors put in. While this is rough, it is entirely possible to add enough detail to make the skin look very smooth (think of pointillism).

Next, we have 1) Realism and b) smooth skin.

 

In this case, the type of brush used becomes much more important. While it is totally possible to use any brush and still have a nice end result, it was much easier for me after finding a brush that I preferred. I know a lot of artists will brush off questions like "what brush do you use" and will say that good artists don't depend on their tools or that good tools don't make the artist, but it can definitely help.

 

The type of brush you should look for has a few qualities:

1) good opacity; not too opaque, as you want the skin to blend, and not too transparent, or you will strain to get color onto the canvas or overcompensate by using very hard pen pressure.

2) good ability to blend, without smearing too much; if you brush just smears color around rather than building it, you might find it hard to get the colors to stay where you want and to control them, ending up with a muddy painting.

 

You can also mix different brushes! I will explain their uses in the next step, as it applies to technique.

For the lips, you can see here, it is common to blend the circled part of the lip with the skin a little bit, which is where you can switch brushes. The basic concept here is blending soft and hard edges on your painting.

 

While I would usually caution to use the airbrush sparingly or carefully as many times, airbrush used improperly can make a painting look overblended (a common mistake when developing control), you can use it here or other places in small increments to blend the hard edge of the lip. You can also use any other blending tool, but airbrush is just the most basic or readily available tool.

Another important thing to think about when painting skin is to think about which edges should be soft and which edges should be hard.

 

In the image above, you can see how the hard edges of the light have been kept. When you are blending light and dark areas, try not to use too many midtones in between. With a good opacity brush that has good blending, you might be able to even easily use one stroke and let it naturally blend. Using too many midtones can give the result of a muddy painting or stretch the area out and make it a bit out of control. You often want to exert control over the color and light you are painting.

 

Things that might be kept soft are natural shifts in hue and saturation in the skin (the uneven pigmentation of the skin), shadows of light sources that are far away, etc.

 

Another thing to consider when determining which parts of a painting should have hard edges and which should have soft is the significance or importance of the area in your painting. General areas with higher importance should be cleaner, while less important areas can be softer. However, it's not a necessary step, depending on what effect you want to have. For clean anime illustrations, it may not be ideal to leave blurry parts of the painting, so it really depends on style and intention.

How should you use airbrush, then? Should you avoid it?

 

Definitely not! Airbrush can be a very amazing tool for anything--I even know of artists that use airbrush for lineart!

 

Here is a piece that I painted almost entirely using the airbrush. Unfortunately it has to be cropped for copyright purposes, but you can definitely see that it is possible to use airbrush to create a very nice skin texture.

 

So what's important when painting using airbrush? ---> control of the size!

 

The larger the size of your brush, the more spread out the color, and the smaller, the more condensed. When your brush is too large, color will accidentally bleed into areas they aren't meant to be in, and while it may not be noticeable at first, the more you work on the piece, the more obvious it becomes. So here, you can leave more general areas of the skin soft, and then decrease the size of the brush to get more control of the areas you are painting.

 

Another thing you can do to control the area you are painting in is to use the lasso tool to prevent the color from getting into unwanted areas, but the hard edge may need to be blended later.

And last piece of advice for realism painting is to use the soft eraser instead of the hard eraser! The hard eraser will create very jarring edges that need to be blended with the rest of the painting, but the soft eraser can create a very natural edge.

 

Even a soft eraser at a very small size will create a different edge than a hard eraser, so you can still use the soft eraser for detailed or small parts that need to be erased.

This is the beginning of the tips for stylized art!

Since he's here (my oc above <3), I'll give a general tip that I mentioned in the previous section that is surely useful here too.

 

In this work, I used multiple brushes. It's always important to think about your hard edges v.s. soft edges, and especially on his abs and (audience's) right bicep, you can see the difference between the hard and soft.

 

This can be achieved by using your painting brush, but one thing I notice is that painting brushes tend to blend color, and if you don't want your colors to blend and only want to soften the area, airbrush can be a good choice. Airbrush doesn't blend or smear the colors, only stacks on top, so it can soften edges without smearing anything.

To give skin a 3D look, it is also important to note the 3D structure. Instead of only giving shadow to the areas not facing the light or the areas where light is blocked by another object, you can create the greater illusion of depth by rounding off the opposite side of the object.

 

Here, you can see while the top is facing the light, you should still shade it a little bit so that it appears round.

What about medium-toned skin? Or darker skin?

 

While I don't have much experience with skin that is very very dark, there's always a need to paint darker skinned characters, or characters that have gone out and gotten a tan, right?

 

For the difference between light and dark skin, it's not a huge difference, but there are some things to take note of.

 

While painting light skin, you can take a color-picker and take a look at the 'saturation' (how close or far to being "black and white", or how close or far from being lacking in color) of the color. What you will find is that with light skin, it is easy to make a color look oversaturated, so it is often painted using very unsaturated colors. In fact, skilled artists can use the surrounding colors to make very unsaturated colors look very lively!

 

For darker skin, it is recommended to saturate the color a little more than lighter skin. The lack of saturation is more obvious on darker skin, and if you use the same saturation that you would use for lighter skin, it may end up making your character look gray and dead. However, if you are painting a zombie or the undead, it's also something you can do intentionally!

 

Darker skin, like lighter skin, also has different undertones. Based on the character, you can choose to make their undertone more yellow or red, which is the basic hue used when painting human skin. Changing the undertone is just changing the 'hue' of the skin: basically sliding on the color wheel.

And characters with unrealistic skin colors?

 

The shading and basic principles also stay the same, but something to take note of again is the saturation. Even when painting darker skin, the saturation (depending on the overall lighting of the piece, although here we can say we are referring to more neutral lighting, where the skin color is not being overly affected by a colored light) usually stays on the more unsaturated side.

 

This means that when picking other colors for skin like blue, you may want to consider keeping the color relatively unsaturated for a more natural skin tone. Colors that are too saturated may look garish or jarring.

 

However, it's not a no! You can definitely use more saturated colors, but they will give a different texture and appearance to the skin. Since the character I painted above was 99% humanoid, just with a different skin color, I kept the basic principles of human skin, but other aliens and species may have different skin textures that look good with more saturated colors.

Last tip, for any art style!

 

When cut-and-pasting, often we will notice that it's very obvious where the image has been moved, and the hard edge, as well as the empty space behind the moved area. I've darkened the area above the character's eyebrow so we can see this effect a little more clearly.

To start, instead of cut-and-pasting, let's copy and paste. This way, we can avoid the white gap, and also be able to check if we like the alignment later on, as we will have different layers.

Then, using a soft eraser, erase the hard edges. This gives a much more natural look to the edge, and it will be much easier to continue painting.

 

This is a tip that I have learned from a wonderful artist online, Coax Illust on Youtube (콕스튜디오). They have many more videos and great painting tips! Please check them out.

 

Finally, one last tool that I want to mention!

 

The 'Liquify' tool!

 

While it doesn't come with Clip Studio, you can definitely find a free one on the Assets. The liquify tool is very useful for adjusting areas when you don't want to cut out an area and paste it or when you need a small change.