How do you color skin? Markers, colored pencils, photoshop? How do you make the skin look non-flat? Any tips from our filter-wizzards?

IF you tell me what you are talking about, maybe I can help ???

If you are talking about your own skin, it depends how long you want the design/drawing to stay. Mehendi designs use a thing called Henna (sp?) to make temporary tattoos, ink markers are cool as well, but they dont last long

Otherwise are you talking about something totally different ?

youpla :-P

quote:Original post by ahw

IF you tell me what you are talking about, maybe I can help ???

If you are talking about your own skin, it depends how long you want the design/drawing to stay. Mehendi designs use a thing called Henna (sp?) to make temporary tattoos, ink markers are cool as well, but they dont last long

Otherwise are you talking about something totally different ?

youpla :-P

Uh, yeah, something totally different. I drew some characters for my game in black-and-white, scanned them in, and cleaned up the scans. Then I tried to use a pour tool to fill in the areas with color, and the skin looked utterly awful.

I have been known to paint people''s skin, but that''s not what I''m working on now.

aaaaaah that''s what I feared. Well, tomorrow when I come back, I''ll try to wrap up a wee tutorial on coloring black and white drawings. Let''s just say that pouring in color is the worst method
There is excellent tutorials for that, but since I dont remember the adress, I''ll do that tomorrow. It''s funny, because I was just scanning in some drawings of mine, so here I am with a perfect excuse to brag

In one word : Layers. Lotsa them.

youpla :-P

There was somone with a tutorial link under the Post Your Art Here thread... by Niko Geyer. But basically anime style shading should work... pick the base skin color, the highlight and the shadow color. Decide wich direction the lights coming from and highlight and shade acordingly with a paintbrush or airbrush (In Photoshop)preferably with a tablet. If you don't have a tablet and plan on doing a lot of that. It's a great investment.

It's easier when you look at how others apply the technique.

This is something I took barely any time on but it's an example...



hmmm... I didn't even really start from a drawing.. I started from a circle I sketched in with my tablet. It keeps me from being lazy and leaving the outlines.

~There's always comfort in anonymity~



Edited by - LadyAnon on December 4, 2000 1:52:24 PM

*Grumph* The drawings I have got make poor examples for colouring... but I''ll try to do something anyway. In the mean time, here is some explanations on what you can do :

First of all I assume you are using Photoshop (or any other Layer based program).

Scan in your B&W drawing. Desaturate it. Then add some Noise (monochromatic) to it. Then Gaussian blur it (not too much, depends on the resolution you have). Once done, use the Adjust>Curves menu to make all light grey shades go white, and all dark grey shades go black. You get a nice outline that looks like markers or paint (see picture at the bottom of that post).

Once you are done with that, DONT TOUCH THIS LAYER ANYMORE. This layer will be what I call the outline, and you''ll keep it that way. All you do, is turn it to the Multiply mode. Basically, all that is black is added to underneath layers, all white is not...

All you have to do now, is create new layers where you put the colour you want. For my ronin, I have a layer for the skin, one for the body armour, one for the legs, the boots, the swords, etc. The idea is that by keeping each areas on different layers, you can later adjust them to look better. In my example, I was hesitating with more orange armours for the contrast with the blue background. But I finally decided that red was just cooler

For the skin itself. In my example, what I did was create a new layer UNDER the layout layer (the one with the B&W drawing). I then took the brush, chose a base skin colour, and filled the areas I wanted to be skin. I then erased whatever was outside of the lines.
Once that was done, I turned the Lock Transparency button on. That way, I can do all my shading without ever worrying if I am inside the lines.

For the shading, it''s very easy to see that I used the Airbrush... Since I didnt want to bother too much, I used the Multiply mode when I want to darken and the Screen mode when I wanted to highlight.
For metallic shadings, Color Burn and Dodge make sharper transisitions, and generally look more metallic ... you''ll have to try by yourself to understand

I later added the actual textures for the armour, pants, and other items, using Overlaid black and white layers on top of my color layers. Why not do the textures straight during the colouring phase ??? Well, that way I can try different textures, and it make the colouring itself easier. And making textures is easier in B&W, especially when you use the methods I described in another thread (shameless plug )

here is an example of a drawing that was 10 centimeters high, drawn in 10 minutes on a piece of paper. I ended up spending a good twelve hours on that one (it was my first colouring)...



youpla :-P