PART 3! SKIN TONES! (Patreon)

1. not just one color

2. blending

3. skin tone

4. shadows

5. highlights

 SKIN TONE or SKIN UNDERTONE!!!

Sooooooo.. when you first look at references, the first thing you'll probably gonna notice when painting the skin is the skin value or the base skin color. 

But to give more depth to your painting, so it won't look flat, and in order to match it with your reference, you also need to add the skin undertone with the base color.

The first row below are some base colors, 2nd row are colors when you add warm tones and 3rd is when you add cool tones.

People can have the same skin base colors, but different skin undertones.

On the left is a cool tone, on the right is the warm tone.

How do I determine someone's skin undertone?

I think it's super easy to spot skin undertones but just in case you're not sure about it, you can just use a little magic tool called color picker!!

First, you can get the base skin color by color picking on areas that you think doesn't have too much make up! The neck can be an easy color pick area because people probably just add foundation on that part, which would match their base.

Now for the tone, under the CLASSIC feature, there are three lines here that you can adjust, first line: HUES, 2nd line SATURATION, 3rd line BRIGHTNESS. If you tap on that circle on the HUES line,

Tada! You can easily see that the tone is warm because it's orange!!!

To get the skin tone, you can just adjust the 2nd and 3rd line until it matches with what you see on the reference picture.

Here you can see the tone that we made, matches with the orange tones on the face. You can actually just guess it tbh without doing this color picking but just in case you need it to be more precise or if it's a neutral skin tone, this would be helpful!

How to put skin tones?

-  So like remember in blending there's COLOR 1 COLOR 2 and MID COLOR? I use skin tones as the mid color for shadows and highlights!

So what colors should I use for skin tones?

- When you look it up online, there are more skin tone categories, but ultimately, what i like to use are the warm and cool tones.

Warm: peachy, gold, yellows, oranges
Cool: reds, violets, pinks

What are skin tones for?

- If you're using reference pictures, this would help capture the likeness of the picture. Will make it more realistic. Give depth!  But if you're painting from imagination, or making original characters, skin tones could help with the mood of your painting. Warm tones are usually associated with bright, colorful, energetic characters, and cool tones are more calm and mysterious.

Here's more skin undertone examples!!!!!