Sooo as it turns out, the key is that when I 'paint' or otherwise draw a face with any materials, I go in and sketch with values light enough to be worked over and shaped into something better later on, and this is usually done with a bit of an undertone colour I try to match the colours I use to.

I don't have a WIP of the blue undertone ghira, but you can see I used it because like the other Ghiras, the part of his face hidden by his hair in the sketch is faintly visible (also on his chin because I didn't have a colour or value to make it darker without it looking weird and I didn't want to break the harmony I had going on by then)

Moving on-

Then what I do is I try to add another light colour or otherwise start carving out the features so I can better build up my darkest values later. For example, pastel-pink Ghira I could keep lighter for a while, because I had the benefit of marker values that tied into the purplish-pink and were light enough to make bigger use of before moving on to darker colours.

Orangehim was the most difficult to do this with because I had no real transition shades to do this with more effectively. So out of the three, he has the biggest contrast between his lights and darks, he pops out a lot more.

In truth I actually like the second WIP of pastel-pink Ghira a bit more than the finished portrait, and I feel like if I wanted to I could've given him his dark eyes and faint purple eyeshadow and left him at that, but that's because I rarely draw pastel vibe things and I guess I'm proud I did something adjacent to that in the beginning stages.

Or maybe not, because I have one more WIP pic of pastelhim and I don't particularly like what I did to him here fhfhfhgh this part was a bit of a 'trust the process' moment for me because I didn't know how I'd come back from making his eyelid/eyebrowless area so dark and muted. I still don't think I did, but the rest of him looks good so I can cut myself some slack

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, that's not actually how I've started painting my faces in digital art for a while now, and I think that not only can you see it, but you can tell I'm trying way too hard for some sort of kinda sorta realistic skin that keeps in generally the same colour family and has no undertone

Example:

A WIP from that one Herohim I drew digitally. You can tell I'm really trying to give him a certain skin tone that's kinda greenish like in canon, but it looks really dead because I don't start with an undertone, and try to paint keeping the colours muted and only shifting the hue from yellow to orange for example.

If I had to start over, I might try going in with a light blue sketch underneath to see if that would help, but eh, I'll figure it out

No but really, it really is the process, that's why we trust the process, we figure it out and we apply it in digital too, and that's a thing that blew my mind when I kinda realised it for myself

Because this is a painting process I've made for myself since I first decided to touch gouache, and it's worked for me and I've used it since.

Case in point, this one is I don't even remember how old, maybe two years, but I still like it and the colours because I worked on it like I did gouache portraits I'd made. A base layer (not sure if it was blue or yellow but I think it was yellow) and everything else on top, painted right on

Basically the lesson I've learned is that mayhaps instead of trying to work digitally like it's a whole separate beast, I actually try to return to my roots and trust the way I actually do things, and it might feel more like me •^•

I've basically infodumped about my random art thoughts sandwiched between the Ghiras, so thank you for reading if you've come this far. Maybe this realisation will help somebody else stuck in a bit of a rut. I will be happy if that's the case ฅ⁠^⁠•⁠ﻌ⁠•⁠^⁠ฅ

It all sounds so simple, but it's really easy to forget that digital art too is a medium, and if you don't like your art in there, it might be because you're forgetting your own process because you're getting lost in the sauce of layers and editing and resizing and ect.

Anyway, I hope the Ghirs have made you smile, I'm actually pretty happy with them! (⁠^⁠.⁠_⁠.⁠^⁠)⁠ﾉ