Skins Tutorial - Face Example

Painting, Brushes and Tools

This section is dedicated to helping you determine which paint tools to use, and some settings that may provide helpfull in creating skins. I don't specifically recomend any particular program because honestly each program has features that the otheres do not. Adobe Photoshop has a great airbrush feature, and very good anti-ailiasing, whereas PaintShop Pro has a very easy interface and palette controls. Corel Photopaint has a wide range of brushes available, and some great procedural type of textures. If you can learn to work with several programs with at least a medium level of expertise, and perhaps one with a high level of expertise you will find yourself better off than being able to work with only one program at a high level. But let me say, if you are very new to computer art programs you may wish to wait untill you become familiar with your first program before moving on to learn another to avoid overloading yourself with too many options.

I've got a large preference for the 'airbrush' style tools myself although they are not the only brushes I use. The airbrush though is very versatile and its settings can be modified in most programs to allow you a great range of output from it so I will cover that first and most indepth.

Lets first talk about some of the basic settings in use of an airbrush paint tool. Not all programs have the same names for these settings but the description should make it apparent what the function is, and upon playing with your program a bit you should be able to discern what the equivalent is.

Opacity- This setting helps determine how much you will be able to see through what you paint. At 0% opacity its like painting without ink. At 100% opacity you will be completely overwriting whatever is beneath your brush. This can be effected though by density and brush size, as well as 'anti-aliasing' which blends edges.
Brush Size- Brush size is fairly apparent. Is it big or is it small? In general I recommend use of medium to smaller brushes the most. Larger brushes will be most often used when you are painting a 'base color' and arent too usefull for more detailed work.
Density - Density reflects the thickness of the 'spray' it could be a very thin difuse type of spray or a very thick concentrated spray. Obviously a thin difuse style of density will give a lower opacity type of effect as well, and a thick concentrated spray will appear more opaque.
Duration - The longer you use the tool, the more opaque it becomes. So if you held a 25% opaque brush over a surface long enough it would become 100% opaque.

So lets take a quick look at how these settings will effect the way your work will look. I am not providing an example of duration as this would be pretty hard for me to give an accurate exaple without using a stopwatch etc, and is easily demonstrated for yourself by holding the brush down longer!

So we see using the same brush, with different settings, and only 1 color range we were able to create a very wide range of results. This is the begining of the key to succesfully painting great looking skins.

The second part of is a concept called 'shading and highlights'. Shading and Highlights are the meat and potatoes of creating a skin.

Lets use a traditional art example to prove my point, and the importance of shading and highlighting!

Well, what do we have here? Its a circle! <gasp, oh , ahhh!>

Using the airbrush tool, and the techniques of shading and highlights, lets turn Mr. Circle into a SPHERE! Woohoo! First lets do some shading! I will choose the airbrush tool, choose the color BLACK and a brush of about 45 pixels (what I consider to be in the medium range for brushes) with an opacity of 1% and I get:

Not too bad, but it doesnt quite look like a sphere yet does it? I wonder why? Think it needs some highlights perhaps? Lets try, same brush, size, and opactiy, but change the color to white and we get:

Okay we are starting to resemble a sphere! I'm going to get crazy here and take the next two steps in one jump, another round of shading and another round of highlights, then throw in a slight blur to blend it all together better.

And finally we have a fairly reasonable sphere :) Using 2 colors (after the green base), 1 brush, and 1 opacity setting and threw in a little bit of blur to blend it and at the end of the process we have transformed a circle into a sphere. And for a bonus I'll get super-fancy and put our sphere in a background with a shadow to show you how it might look in a scene (doesn't do itself justice on a black background I realized):

Whoa, that made a big difference huh? :)

Now lets think about this for a minute. Shading and highlighting huh? These two tools are as I earlier stated the meat and potatoes of creating a skin that looks good. Shading is what gives everything 'depth' and realism. Practice shading untill you become good at it. The ability to shade and highlight is neccesary to create almost anything you will put into a skin. You need to be able to evaulate where shading would naturally occur. If someone is wearing a pair of large goggles for instance, would there not be some shadow underneath the goggles? Use shading to produce it. Wouldn't the goggles lenses likely ahve some light reflecting from them? Use highlights to respresent the light.

(note if you like this 'traditional art example' I use you can get much more of the same stuff if you attend some basic art classes :)

Okay enough on shading. Lets talk about some other tools. Most paint programs also include quite a few different 'brushes' or paint tools. Some common usefull ones are:

Blur - Blur can many times be accessed through a filter, or a brush. Blur helps smooth things out. When you create something and it has 'harsh' lines that you need to smooth out, you can sometimes do it much quicker by using a blur filter/brush than you can by trying to do shading with an airbrush.

Pencil/Paint - A pencil or paintbrush style tool are good for detail work at the pixel level in my experience. Usually these type of tools are 100% opaque and will give you exactly the color you have selected wherever you use it. Quite often if I am looking at a skin Im working on and I notice 'oh gosh his pupil in his eye isn't black' I will use this type of tool, reduce it to 1 pixel size and paint it black. If I had used an airbrush style tool, even at a 1 pixel width it still might bleed past that one pixel and darken the pixels around it. Thusly the use of a pencil or paint type of tool is more appropriate in some circumstances.

Bucket - I don't use this quite as often but its certainly usefull for getting certain things done fast, such as filling a large area with a base color. Instead of using your airbrush to try to get a surface all one color you can simply use the 'bucket' tool and fill it in instantly. It is usefull quite often to 'mask' the area you wish to paint first to prevent from filling in areas you've already spent your time on.

Smudge - Another one I don't use as often but occiasonally can be quite usefull is the smudge tool. This basically causes one color to smudge into another. I most often use it to create weathering effects like smeared mud, etc.

Clone - The clone tool will copy one area to another. For instance say you were creating some denim jeans on your skin and you really liked the way you had done one part, you could use the clone tool to copy that to the rest of the area it needs to be.

Burn/Dodge - Theoretically something I should get more use out of, provides darkening and lighting features that vary from using the airbrush. Specifically you would use this to lighten/darken an area in its own color range, but you couldn't put a yellow highlight on blue sphere with this tool. I more often find myself manually selecting the color I want to use to highlight or darken with, but this tool may be easier for some people.

Again I won't go into depth on these tools because I don't think the average person will need to use them too often, but at least the breif explanation here should help you out if you find a circumstance that calls for a use of that nature.

Masking

Masking is a very usefull technique that helps you paint only where you want to. Its kind of like when you were young they told you to color 'inside the lines' and you eventually learned how. Well with many paint tools even if you paint inside the line it may go over because of its anti-aliasing (blending) features. Sometimes that is desireable, but when it is not you need to 'mask out' a selection to isolate it so your painting only effects it.

There are several common masking tools, all of which I find to be very usefull.

Square - Allows selection of a square/rectangluar area.
Oval/Circle - Allows selection of an oval or circular area
Magic Wand - Allow selection of a simliar color range. For instance it might select all the 'black' in a certain area, but not neccesarily on the whole image. If there are two black areas that are separated by a white line it will only select the area where you clicked.
Lasso - Allows you to select 'freehand' but dragging the tool around the outline you wish to use.
Sticky - Similar to 'freehand' selection but it attempts to stick to 'edges' like if you wanted to select a persons head, it would try to find the contrast between the head and the background and stick to the edge of the head. Sometimes this works great, other times it doesnt work well at all.
Inversion - Usually not an actual tool but most programs have a 'selection' menu where you can choose the option 'inverse' which means 'the opposite of what is currently selected'

A common use for this might be for instance to select only the chest of skin and paint inside the masking. Once I'm done I may select one of the arms and then paint it, and so on. Also you might have made an outline of a feature you wish to paint such as chest armor but that leaves the abdominal area exposed (not very effective in real life but visually appealing on a skin) so you could use the selection tools to select only the area that will be designated for the armor and paint it. Then later you can select the abdominal area and paint it without fear of getting flesh tones on your armor.