#art qs

sketch

can be messy, it's gonna get covered anyways, mostly just there for general placement and composition of elements

2. block in general shapes/values with a combo of a hard and soft brush

sometimes i start straight away with monochrome color and sometimes i start in grayscale and just slap on a color/overlay layer on top of it. doesn't matter too much either way, but i like having an underpainting color to help set the mood of a piece! i also like to keep this layer separated in case i want to change the hue of the underpainting later

3. start picking local colors and 'carving' out the forms by painting over the previous layers

i tend to do this the same way that i would approach a traditional painting---use the largest brush size possible for as long as possible before decreasing brush size to add details. economy of brushstrokes babeyyyy for example, the shadowed plane under keith's brow is just a single brushstroke for a while before adding any sort of sclera or lashline; similarly, the side of his face is pretty much the same value across the whole plane---the smaller planes around his mouth and cheekbones aren't added until the end

4. adjust colors with gradient maps, overlay layers, tone curve, correcting contrast, or any other tools that fit the need of the piece

i mess around with layer modes and correction layers sooo much. get experimental! use multiple correction layers at various opacities! u never know what could create an interesting effect in case any clip studio users r interested, some of the gradient sets that i like to mess around with have CSP content ids of: 2009366, 1790425, 1814319, 2201736, 1764669. some typical layer modes i like to try for them are color, hue, brightness, soft light, overlay, and multiply

5. continue painting on new layers above everything else to add details, fix proportions, and add pops of color

finishing steps yayyy here's where i fuss around with the details like expressions and the smallest planes of the face! this is also where i add 'lines' where extra definition is needed and pops of saturated color (usually color picked from somewhere else in the piece to maintain continuity) i also try to leave some of the soft edges that were established in stage 2 for balance. for me personally, too much contrast overshoots into no contrast---if everything is demanding attention, the eye doesn't know where to look. so i like to reserve high contrast (whether that's achieved through saturation, value, or both) for whatever i want the focal points of a piece to be! tbh with this one there's a couple places that i think i overworked and could have left even softer, but. live and learn haha

with that all being said☝️i am realizing that these are my general rendering steps and not particularly specific to skin. imo the basic principles are the same as painting anything else; however, here are a few other things that r bouncing around in my head when painting skin and faces:

color variation! shifting the hue slightly cooler and warmer across different planes helps skin look more alive. i tend to go for cooler shadows if the light source is warm and warmer shadows if the light source is cooler (like in this one). turning on a slight color jitter for a brush can also be fun. in addition, u can indicate planes changing direction by keeping the same value and shifting the hue, or vice versa

brush type! skin in particular has a lot of layers that light passes through, which gives it lots of depth. i like to use brushes that have some color mixing turned on for stages 3 and 5 because i like being able to layer and build up colors/opacity gradually, with a bit of the lower layers showing through

texture! another way to build up layers of color is using brushes with texture. e.g. grain brushes, rake brushes, anything that's not entirely solid but has a high opacity (as opposed to a brush that has little texture but lower effective opacity due to mixing)

density! thinner areas of skin like ears and noses allow more light to pass through it, which causes subsurface scattering. can also happen in thicker body parts with high intensity light. hold ur hand in front of a lamp and u will see LOL. i am suddenly reminded of that mercedes ad with the cow illuminated by headlights...

ok. i think i'm done now LMFAO. last thing i’ll say is be silly and have fun and try new things!!!😼

So specific tools and software doesn't actually really matter, but for the record, what I used there is *checks video* Clip Studio Paint's gouache brush, the big textured brush I believe came from Ahmed's brush pack, (which was made for photoshop but can be imported into CSP) it's one of the oil brushes with the texture scale turned down, I believe. Then the lasso tool, an airbrush tool for some softness and color overlays and such, and CSP's "gauze cloud" as the textured brush for the snowy fog around the top of the mountains. I briefly used a blending tool on the sky, but tbh.. I don't really like blending tools. But my main goal there was to just soften that back into a gradient. Oh and a little bit of the finger smudge tool in the water. Which is actually way more tools than I'd normally use. Usually best to stick to only a few, tbh. You want your render to be at least somewhat consistent.. Not that it's a Rule. I mean use however many a piece demands, it doesn't really matter. The point is you don't want to over-complicate the process unnecessarily, or let playing with brushes distract from focusing on the piece itself. Anyway. To get to the point.

Beginners are commonly warned against using blur/blending tools and airbrushes, because overblending is a very tempting and common tendency when you start out. You can lose form and texture. And when everything is really soft, even the slightest hard edge stands out simply by contrast, which can encourage more overblending. So it's common to be kinda scared of hard edges lol.

But hard/firm edges are super important! They're important for composition, defining form, creating visual interest, etc. And even in areas of softness and rest you can create interest with texture and brushstrokes and color vibration and all that good stuff, which is why manual blending is usually preferred. But it is partly a matter of style. The best area for blur specifically would probably be if you wanted that out-of-focus effect. (but in such a case I think using smth like gaussian blur on an entire layer, rather than a blur tool, would be best... but I digress.)

If you find yourself overblending, my advice would be to confiscate your blur/blending/airbrush tools for a while lol. It's actually only just recently that I started using them at all. And even then I mainly use airbrushes, and rarely touch blending tools. But I feel more comfortable with it now, because I'm not using them to blend away my problems lol. I use them more deliberately now, rather than using them as a crutch to make something look smooth and pretty to compensate for my lack of fundamentals or something. Not that I'm totally free of that, though lol. My fundamentals are still not very strong, and I still think I overblend too much. General rule of thumb: If you're still learning the basics, it's best to stick to the basics. Tools are tools, there's no shame in any of them, but some you have to be a bit careful with. So when it comes to blending tools and airbrushing, I'd recommend trying to limit your use of them, especially at the start. Learning to blend manually is important, and it also gives you far more control.

Pay attention to your reference. The main places I'd use soft brushes and/or blending tools are things like soft gradients in the sky or water, or to establish some base color gradients over which you can do more textured detail work, or ambient occlusion. And try to stick to the principle of contrast. Soft edge, hard edge, soft edge, hard edge. Simplicity, complexity. That constant back and forth rhythm creates visual interest.

Okay idk if any of that answered your question, but I'll stop here. Feel free to let me know if I need to clarify something. And sorry if you were hoping for brevity 😂

I hope it helped, though?

csp user asset brushes with content IDs; a lot of these are sets of multiple:

pencil: 1758182, 2182353

marker: 1692034, 2184052

ink: 1994873, 2138244, 1713064, 2135152, 1718969, 2101772

miscellaneous: 1915353, 1993875

downloaded brushes:

true grit texture supply sample pack! free, very large, and has some brushes that have been favs for a couple of years now. also available for several other programs if ur not a csp user

loish’s brushset i got off gumroad a long time ago i think? tried to track it down and it looks like u can still get them free here, albeit with slightly more steps now lol

charlie bowater’s brushset also from many years ago, but it looks like they r still available here for free!