【HOW TO COLOR SKIN】 Watercolor Tutorial

In this video you will learn how you can create such a soft looking skin with watercolors.
You will learn how to mix your own skin tones, chose the right paper and which techniques
you need, to work on delicate gradients like these.
>> LAOVAAN: Using watercolor to color skin is one of the harder subjects, especially
if the skin should look realistic and clean.
Because with watercolor you can only go from light to dark, mistakes are hard to undo and
we need to be certain of what we are going to do.
The key is to use the wet in wet technique at the right time, that is: when to work on
wet paper when applying color.
But before we can do that, let’s have a look at the skin tones.
Mixing skin tones from scratch requires 4 different components: Red, Ochre, Brown and
White.
Instead of Ochre you can also go with Yellow, but the key is to get the right mixing ratio.
Since there is no single skin tone, it is up to you.
If the color seems too reddish, add more yellow and vice versa.
Use brown to darken it and white to lighten it.
The benefit of mixing your own tones is that you are free to change even the tiniest nuances
which makes it useful for any character you want to color.
The disadvantage on the other hand is, that it’s really hard to get the same tone every
time, so you might also want to work with a fixed tone for skin.
My favorite tone for this is naples yellow reddish.
When you are using a fixed skin tone like this, it’s a lot easier to focus on combining
your tone with other colors for various types of shading.
You don’t have to mix your base tone again every time you want to try out a new variation.
It will also be a lot more consistent when you can always rely on the same base tone.
An important aspect when mixing skin tones and the matching shadows is to not limit yourself
to only 2 or 3 different fleshtones.
Depending on light situations you can add all colors to your basic skin tone to match
with the overall scenery.
A sunset would obviously require a different palette than a rainy day.
Giving our skin more variations than just brown tones is important to give our image
atmosphere.
So I made a color wheel to give us a little overview.
On the left I put the spectrum of fleshtones without any other added color but brown.
I chose a base tone, in my case naples yellow reddish, to use as an example for the rest
of the diagram.
Of course you can use any other color for this.
On the very right I used just the color itself and dulled with black.
In the middle I mixed all the other colors in to get an overview of my possibilities.
Personally I really like the purple shadow, because it goes with a lot of different sceneries,
adding more vividness to the skin.
To pick the right colors for your drawing just experiment, for example by practicing
with using movies or photos as reference.
A tip for darker tones: use an acrylic foundation.
The color won’t lift off of the paper the way watercolor does and that makes it more
comfortable to paint shadows and highlights on top.
You don’t have to worry about the white of the paper shimmering through while shading.
Last but not least the choice of paper will have an impact on your painting.
I recommend strong paper, because for the technique that I am going to show you we are
going to push the colors around a lot.
The texture of your paper will also have an effect on the appearance of your painting.
There is rough paper and there is paper with almost no visible texture.
Let me tell you right away: both kinds of paper work, as long as they are strong enough,
but they do have different benefits.
Rough textured paper will make your picture more grainy and your painting clearly identifiable
as a work of watercolor.
But it is also easier to hide tiny flaws, since they can merge with the texture.
Compared to that, on fine paper every stain or edge stays visible like on a plate and
it’s very unforgiving.
Nevertheless, choosing paper that has no texture enables a more softly rendered and 3 dimensional
look.
It conceals the typical watercolor look completely and makes it appear almost like digital art.
Before I start painting I Look at my sketch or lineart and divide it into tiny pieces
in my head that will need individual attention.
Skin, lips, eyes, neck, hair, background etc.
Then I plan the order that I am going to work in.
Keep in mind, with watercolor you can only work light to dark.
so start with the light areas.
Occasionally the face is covered by darker hair.
When that’s the case you can paint over the lines with skin color without any regret,
because it will be covered by the darker color of the hair afterwards.
So the order of this piece will be: Skin of the face, lips, white of the eye,
eyes, eyebrows, neck, hair, background, beanie and clothes, hand.
It won’t be that strict and I most probably will jump around between the steps when I
am not satisfied with details, but this is the rough plan basically ;)
With this painting I work with a digital reference I made previously.
You can use the color wheel to help you choose the right color.
In my case I can find the base tone around the orange/red spectrum, the darker ones seem
more in the reddish brown area.
First I wet the area of the face.
Normally I use plain water for it, but if the painting is darker, you can already add
a tint.
The neck will follow up later, I only care about the face at this point.
I am going to wet it with a brush thoroughly.
We need to wet the surface because soft color gradients can only be achieved when the area
is wet
Then I start placing a mixture of Naples yellow reddish and Saturn red to determine the basic
light situation.
This mixture is going to be my base color, because it covers most of the face.
Carefully put the base color down.
As long as the paper is wet we can push the colors in the right direction.
Don’t paint where the highlights are supposed to go.
Once covered they would be hard to lighten up again.
Because the highlights aren’t plain white as well I applied a light wash of rutile yellow
to mute them down a bit giving the skin a warmer appearance.
Once everything really dried down the grainy texture has disappeared.
The colors are now set and should be fixed with the paper.
We can now carefully add another layer of water,without lifting any color off of the
paper.
So we wet the whole surface again.
We will repeat the process of letting the paper dry and wetting it all over again every
time we add another layer.
When the surface is carefully wetted, I apply another layer of my mixed base color.
(naples yellow reddish + saturn red).
It’s about deepening and refining the shadows we previously did.
Again I avoid using the base tone on the highlights so they stay light.
The damp paper will help carrying the color, so we can softly blend it with the first layer.
Let it dry
Time for the next layer.
I carefully wet the paper with clear water again.
This time I add the brown shadow tones with a mixture of (Burnt Sienna Mars brown and
Naples yellow reddish).
These are not placed on the whole face but on the areas where there is the least light.
First I carefully draw a line with the shadow tone and then blend them with the rest.
A tissue helps to regulate the colors that are left in the brush.
This way you can work with the color on the paper without adding any new color to it.
This is the key to smudging the already placed color and to create soft shadows.
Here's a tip: If you painted over lines ,where there is no possible darker color to cover
the mistake, you can take some water and your brush and try to lift them off by carefully
rubbing it off with your clean brush.
Once again let the colors dry completely and wet it again.
This time we are going to deepen the shadow with the next layer and also we add a more
saturated tone compared to our base color.(naples yellow reddish + transparent orange + saturn
red)
This will be our transition tone that defines and blends the places where the shadow and
the base tone meet.
This makes the painting more vivid and interesting because now the skin looks like it consists
of more than just a highlight a base and a shadow tone.
I add more depth by adding more layers of colors the way we did before.
I defined the nose and the nostrils by using even darker colors on the wet paper (green
umber, mars+brown) and lifting it off with a clean brush at those places where I want
harder shadows
I have ignored the lips so far, because I don’t want them softly blended in to the
skin just like the shadows.
So this time after everything dried, I won’t wet the face all over again but carefully
paint the basic shape of the lips.
i used potters pink + mars brown and burnt sienna.
At this point we don’t want to paint over the line.
It would ruin the soft skin, since we couldn’t lift off spilled color without lifting off
the color of the skin.
So be very careful with this part.
When the lips are wet I fill them with shadows.
I let the lips dry down completely and then wet the whole face again.
At this point I try to blend parts of the lips with the skin, so they won’t look like
sticked on.
Also I used the occasion to add more shadows to the lips.
Time for the eyes.
I wet the area of the eyes with a light grey to give the white of the eye some shadows,
making them appear like a sphere.
When it dried down we can start with the rest of the eyes.
Just as with the lips I am very careful, because I don’t want to paint over the lines when
drawing the lash line or eyebrows . I used phthalo sapphire blue and indigo for
the eyes.
Because the face is almost done I start working on the neck.
it’s just my personal preference, so you can do it differently.
But I feel the neck and the face fit together better when they are done directly one after
the other.
Nothin much to say on how its painted.
It works just like how I did the face, wetting the area, placing colors, letting it dry and
repeat :).
Back to the eyes.
At certain points I feel the need to use a pencil for single lashes, when brushes give
me a hard time to draw delicate lines.
So i really recommend switching media when it’s for the benefit of the picture.
If the pencil stands out we can also wet it and add color again.
This way we can merge everything together or add more depth.
Last but not least we add highlights on eyes and lips with a covering white.
This is what the picture looks like when everything else is done.
You can see that the areas where we painted over the lines are covered by other details
like the hair or her shirt for example.
There will be a full video of this picture very soon on my channel, so make sure to subscribe
so you don’t miss it ;)
Also tell me in the comments what you want me to cover next.
Thank you very much for watching and i hope to see you again next time.
If you are interested in other videos that feature a soft rendered skin click here.
If you are interested in more tutorials watch the playlist here.

【HOW TO COLOR SKIN】 Watercolor Tutorial

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