Introduction

Skin tutorials are abundant, so I’ve done my best to make my contribution a bit different.  First of all, it will cover more than one skin tone.  Current tutorials are for either Caucasian skin or dark skin, with little to offer in-between.  This tutorial will cover several shades each of light skin, medium skin, and dark skin, as well as how to paint fantasy and horror skin-tone effects such as unnatural colors, ethereal glows and “corpse” skin.  
 

I will also discuss how surrounding colors and different amounts of ambient light will impact the colors you choose for skin, and how to build a skin tone from start to finish.
 

I use Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter for my digital work.  While there will be some program-specific discussion, the theory and basic techniques are applicable to any program and medium.  This is NOT a tutorial about anatomy or color theory, but both are critical to painting skin well.  I will address only points that are relevant, so please take the time to learn these subjects on your own time—it will make all the difference in your skill level, trust me!
 

Skin Basics

Many tutorials break down skin into a mid-tone, shadow tone, highlight, and sometimes a “warmth” color. While this is the right idea, it’s not that simple. Skin is not a flat, uniform surface; what makes it so difficult to paint is the variation of colors within it.  So I’m going to take the liberty to expand the usual mid-tone, shadow, and highlight formula to include a few other things to make the complexity of skin tones easier to understand.
 

The colors and application of these different tones will vary depending on the type of skin you are painting.  I’ll go over the differences further in Section II.  But all skin tones follow the same basic formula:
(1) MID-TONES :  These are the colors that portray the actual “color” of the skin.  There should be several of them, all with similar value and saturation but ranging across a few different hues.  The saturation should be fairly low regardless of skin tone.  A common mistake is to make the mid-tones too orange, pink, or saturated in general.
 

(2) BASE TONE :  The middle of your middle tones, so to speak.  The most important thing about the base tone is that it is quit dull and unremarkable.  All of the other colors will build on it. 
 

(3) SHADOW TONES :  The darkest areas of an object; the parts that are cast in shadow by the light source.  There are two things to remember about shadow tones:  one is that they are usually very saturated.  The other is that they are not consistent or uniform.  Both the colors and the deepness of the shadows should vary a great deal throughout the figure’s body.  Handling the shadow tones correctly is one of the key ways to make skin look realistic.
 

(4) HIGHLIGHTS :  The brightest areas of an object; the parts that catch the most light.  This includes any area of the form/body that is brighter than the mid-tones.  Like the shadow tones, highlights also should vary in brightness and color for the most realistic effect. 
 

(5) PEAK HIGHLIGHTS :  Peak highlights are the extra bright, reflective areas that are often caused by oil on the skin.  You’ll find them most commonly on the nose and lips.  Use them sparingly and be sure to distinguish them from the normal highlight tones.
 

(6) WARMTH :  Warmth tones are the colors that bring life to skin—it’s the flush in your cheeks, the redness of the knees and feet.  They are highly saturated and include pink, orange, and red.   Do not use them all over the skin or too boldly. 
 

 The mid-tones, base tone, and shadow tones are all used pretty directly (at high opacity/full pressure).  The highlights and warmth tones, however, are not used directly.  They are lightly mixed on top of the other colors with low opacity or light pressure.  This helps mimic the natural translucency of skin and keep the color of each tone from overwhelming the rest.  You want the highlights and warmth colors to enhance the skin, not to overpower it and make the skin look clownish.>  Warmth colors in particular tend to be absurdly bright on their own, but when carefully added to other colors, they add just enough punch to bring the whole skin to life.  
 

Highlight colors are bright but deceptively de-saturated, and a little secret to realistic skin tones is to use more than one highlight color.  Cool highlights (bright turquoise, blue, or lavender) are excellent for giving skin a natural look, but don’t neglect pink and yellow highlights; balancing those warm tones with cool ones is what’s really going to make your skin look good.  
 
Your background colors will also have a big impact on the skin colors, but I will go more in depth about that later.  For now, suffice to say that integrating colors from your background into your skin palette is another great way to add spice to your skin-tone and keep your figures from looking “pasted” into the environment. 
 

Let’s see how this formula works on a simple sphere.  Even when painting in grayscale, a range of grays is used for each tonal range.  Once color is introduced, I need to create variation of hue and saturation in addition to the value variation.  On the right-most sphere, a “warmth” color was added.  All I did was lightly brush that one color onto part of the sphere, and look at the difference it made:  it makes the sphere look lively and pulls out all sorts of lovely, subtle variations in the pre-existing colors.

 
Before we move on to different skin tones, these are the two most common mistakes I see people make when painting skin:
 

+ Using too small a range of colors.  This is probably the biggest mistake.  People will chose one skin-like color, then use a darker and lighter version of that same color to shade and highlight.  NEVER DO THIS!  The result is skin that is flat and lifeless.  The key to good skin is color variation.  I cannot stress this enough.  Use many colors and vary the hues, values, and saturation across every tonal range.  Be bold, too.  Don’t be afraid to throw around completely random colors, just to see what happens.   Often those sudden “color accents” are what really make skin come to life.

+Using low-contrast shadows.  This is a life-killer for skin, and it used to be something I did all the time a few years ago before I learned color theory.  Low contrast shadows will make skin look lifeless and flat.  One of the biggest secrets to realistic skin is in exaggerating the saturation in portions of the shadow tones.  Shadows are not black or gray; they are color, and the more colors you use, especially in the deepest parts of the shadows, the better it tends to look. 

Here is an old painting of mine done several years ago.  Notice how flat and dull the skin looks in the original—not only did I use low contrast shadows, I also used colors that were far too desaturated.  In the second image, the form comes to life through adding in deep, colorful shadows and hue variation.  Color is what defines a form, so using better color in this way makes the figure more believable and alive.
 
 
NEXT SECTION: [ II :: SKIN TONES ]