Step By Step Guide To Painting Realistic Textures In Digital Artwork

Step By Step Guide To Painting Realistic Textures In Digital Artwork – Basically, to paint skin, you need to know where and how the light appears, which consequently creates shadows, which, along with skin and color qualities, is all you need to paint skin. If you want to give it texture, it’s easy. There are an infinite number of brushes that have these features, but even if they have this feature, they won’t paint for you, you have to do it based on your knowledge. For that you need to know the basics. You can’t start running until you know how to walk.

I hope this tutorial explains more about this realism technique and is not too long and boring. Let’s get started.

Step By Step Guide To Painting Realistic Textures In Digital Artwork

(Ouch!!! Sorry if it’s a bit long. This tutorial is like telling you to emphasize what matters most, but everything is important.)

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Light and shadows give volume to a drawing, in drawing when we paint the skin we create volumes that shape the body, knowing this it is important to know the basics.

Although lights and shadows are also used for flat drawings, they do not add much depth, but speaking of 3D drawings, it is necessary to give a three-dimensional feel to a 2D plane by applying lights and shadows correctly. More than anything else, it is required to give the impression of images that jump into reality; we achieve this by means of a play of shadows and light.

(visual explanation gif) Seeing the circle become a sphere in a 2D environment makes me wonder if life is like that, we just don’t notice it because of the way our brains process information. not you =͟͟͞͞( ✌ °∀° ) ☛

Light allows us to see contours, textures and colors, in this sense we want: direct light, reflected light.

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DIRECT LIGHT: Comes from a light source with its own light energy, such as sunlight, light bulbs, flashlights, etc.

REFLECTED LIGHT: Also called indirect light, it is a type of light that comes from the body, it has no light in itself, but rather receives it from another because the light reflects it.

As for the shadows, remember that they are responsible for giving volume to the painting. They are divided into: own, reflexive and predictive. Below is a brief description:

PRIVATE SHADOW: It means that it is the area where the light cannot reach directly, it is the twilight zone, and the color is usually darker.

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PROJECTED SHADOW: It is the shadow that the object reflects on the surface where the object is located. This shadow has the property that the farthest part of the object is diffused and the nearest part is dark and hard.

REFLECTED SHADOW: It is the shadow that an object projects on another object, that is, they are neighbors between objects and are generated under reflected light. This is best understood by placing an object with a different color. The light that the secondary object reflects on the primary object will be proportional to its own color. All objects reflect their color, including skin (explained below).

To shade a drawing, it is important to know the elements we need to reflect. For this, there are two types of lighting: natural and artificial. These lights are relevant to a skin quality explained later.

NATURAL LIGHT: It is the light reflected by the sun or moon. Since the light source is far away, it travels parallel, in a straight line. It is projected onto the object at an angle of 45º and has the same shape and extension as the illuminated object.

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ARTIFICIAL LIGHT: It is the electric light projected by electric lamps, lanterns, candles or bulbs, and spreads in straight and radial directions. The projection on the subject is not an angular projection and projects a wider and thinner shape onto the subject.

With the above already in mind we can now learn how to paint the skin. I will use a sphere to explain it.

The first thing we need to do is find out where the light will come from in order to know where the shadows will be and thus use the structure of light and shadows described earlier. Then apply the base color. After that is applied, let’s create a “new layer” in “Flat to layer below” mode. In this layer you will airbrush small green and reddish spots with low coverage. Use the blur tool to make them diffuse. This is to simulate the internal processes of the skin, which I explain below. This step is optional.

Above we will create a new layer in the mode “Flat to lower layer” and change the blending mode to “Multiply”. Here we will apply shadows with the same base color. Since you are in multiply mode, the base color will now appear darker. There is no need to set the layer to multiply, you can do it yourself by choosing a dark color, but it’s easier that way. Once the shadow is applied, we will place the lights on an even layer above it in “Patch to Lower Layer” mode and blend everything evenly. With the information in the first part, if you know where the light is coming from, you know where the shadows are.

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Once you’ve done the above, it’s now your turn to place the brightness of the direct light, placing it at the point of greatest light using the airbrush. Use a light color. If you feel it’s too bright, lower the opacity of the layer.

Then add a new layer in “Flat to layer below” mode where I want to place the pore texture (textures are explained in a few paragraphs below). To do this, take a brush that had a grainy texture, use a dark brown brush and a medium size brush, apply the texture to the entire sphere. I lowered the opacity of the layer so that the pores are not so intensely visible.

As a final step, place a layer in “Flat to layer below” mode and change the “layer mode” to “Overlay”. In this layer I airbrushed a saturated orange color that lives on the edge of light and shadow. I faded it a little. To give realism, normally if you look at the boundaries of light and shadow, there is a small saturation line.

Done, now we know how to paint the skin!!! If you notice, the doctrine explained in the section on lights and shadows has been followed.

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With color theory, we can extract colors from non-human skin. Unfortunately, I’m not going to explain all the color theory because that would be a very long explanation, but I’m going to tell you the most important things you can do in Clip Studio when it comes to lighting.

First, consider your average local skin tone. This color is defined as areas where shadows, midtones, highlights or highlights remain unchanged. Simply put, this is what we call a person’s ‘skin colour’, i.e. black, white and brown.

Second, to get a gradient scale it is important not to switch to white or black because the result is gray, not natural. It is best to choose colors diagonally, demarcate the center and the curve as shown below. The first is a bad example, the others are acceptable.

Human skin has many colors, from dark brown to almost white. So the question is, what values ​​do I use to get realistic and decent skin? Well, here is the magical and simple technique: a drop and a reference.

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To get a realistic skin tone, nothing is easier than clicking a picture. So, take high quality photos, references. Look for extremes in sampling: Look for the lightest and darkest points. There is good tone under the hair or under the chin; there are shiny areas on the cheeks, nose and forehead; Find another place to test the midrange.

Colormap is a table of different gradients or random colors. You can get them in the Clip Studio store.

To have the map in Clip Studio, it is very easy to go to the store, download the desired map, go to the materials, download them, take the map and drag it into the color palette. That’s it, enjoy the map. Below I leave a GIF of the process.

The skin reflects colors. If you take an illuminated object and place it close to your skin, it will reflect the color of the object. This is explained at the beginning of the tutorial where we talked about the reflected shadow. The colors in the environment are constantly reflected by our skin, which is why when painting skin, understanding the ambient light becomes an important factor. Use adjacent colors to add realism to your work.

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This is an example of environmental colours. The skin is in a purple environment, so the skin gets a slight tint of the color of the environment next to it, in this case the background, which is the closest environment. Looking at the example below, notice how the left bullet doesn’t blend into the background,