Soft Gay Art Blog

HELLO fellow digital artists!! Do you also struggle with making a skin tone?? Do you find it hard to observe the tones in someone’s face and instead just see pink/brown/beige?? LEMME SHOW YOU HOW TO CHEAT PREDICT WHAT THESE TONES WILL BE.

So get your lineart and like 20 clear layers and let’s do this!

1. At its most basic, the face is in 3 colour slices. There’s yellow/neutral stuff at the top, pinky flesh stuff in the middle, and then grey/blue shadow in the bottom half

2. But these colours don’t stay only in those zones. You’ve seen blue below your eyes, yeah? PAINT THAT. There’s also extra pink blush concentrated on the cheeks and nose tip. Also there’s some yellow toned stuff around your mouth and jaw. Don’t ask me why!!

3. Also there’s other stuff like some orange toned inverted triangles below the eyes and also a desaturated/neutral patch running up the bridge of the nose and at the very top of the forehead

4. By now your painting is looking WEIRD AS SHIT. Also the mouth is pink I forgot to say lol. To recap:

5. But then you repaint these zones with more organic shapes and a nice blendy brush.... try and follow the contours of the facial structure....

6. Starting to look more like a human person? EXCELLENT! I then take a very translucent white just to dull everything down and make it less trippy

7. Then I go back to my reference photo or to my imagination and get a skin tone that you think could be the ‘average’ or ‘neutral’ skin tone for your fella. I then do a wash with this, again on low opacity. You want your undercolours to come through like tones beneath the ‘normal’ colour

8. THATS THE BASICS. From there I do some brown and white light/shade washes...

9. Then I tone that shit down to like 10% for the brown and 30% for the lights. Then I wack in some detail colour like eyes and lips and shit

10. Now you have the beginnings of a face with tones and shit in it! From there go wild with the details and line art and etc etc etc but CONGRATS on not having a 1-colour-face.