How To Color Skin Tones // with colored pencils

1. What you will learn in this course: Hello and welcome. If you're watching this, you probably like to draw color with colored pencils and are looking to learn or improve your colored pencil technique. Whatever your artistic journey is. I'm glad you're here because that means that you willing to take your skin tone coloring to the next level. So why her skin tone so fascinating, difficult, and important in art? Well, it's all about the faces, isn't it? Research shows us that human beings respond to human faces way stronger and more positively than to anything else, followed only by dogs, cats, and sunsets. That means that using portraits in your art, whether you're drawing, painting, or coloring, will make your work more likely to be noticed and admired. But just portraits aren't enough. They have to be beautifully and professionally executed. Now, this is not a portrait drawing class. We won't be learning proportions and sketching and angles here. That's a totally separate topic. Here we will focus on skin only. So in order to jump straight into skin tone coloring, I've created three digital oil paintings for us to use as reference images. If you're an accomplished Illustrator already, you may wish to copy these characters or draw your own. But if you're a colorist or just wished to skip the sketching or drawing step. I've also made each one of these models into a grayscale coloring page and into a sepia coloring page. So you have plenty of options to work with. Personally, I will be working on the sepia pages printed on tantamount paper. And I will take you on a step-by-step journey from just a line drawing to a complete color portrait done in pencils. I will teach you my color selection strategies. Introduce you to some fun new colors that you may not have ever thought of using on skin tones teach you different shading techniques and much, much more. We will start with a pale skin tone, move on to olive skin, and finish the course with the most challenging one of all, the dark skin tone. I strategically chose this order based on what I've learned from my color and community over the years. So please follow the lessons in order. So when you're ready, I'll see you in class. 2. White charcoal (pale skin): So the first thing that we will do is we'll prime this page with white charcoal, but not the entire page, just the parts that matter. Let me show you white charcoal. White charcoal is amazing. This is my favorite tool to work with when I work with pencils. I never ever do a pencil coloring or a pencil drawing without using the stuff, especially when I'm working on tantoned paper. White charcoal is not like regular charcoal. In fact, it's not charcoal at all. It's synthetic, and it's mostly chalk and pigment. It has nothing to do with charcoal, nor does it behave like charcoal. It's not powdery at all, it's not smudgy. I tend to use the sticks rather than the pencils, and you can see that they're not leaving any pigment on my skin whatsoever. In a minute, you will see how it behaves on paper. The way that I sharpen this stuff, it is very simple. Most pencil sharpeners will fit this type of a stick perfectly, so you can just run it through a pencil sharpener. Or what I've been doing lately is I've been using a razor blade to sharpen my tip. That way I actually collect a lot of the pigment that I can later use with a Q tip for additional shading. I use it just the way that I would use a pencil, and I shade with it with the side of this triangle tip. Try not to hold your pencil vertically. That's a general rule in shading. Don't hold your tool 90 degrees against the paper. Try to make the angle as flat as possible so that you're coloring with the side, not with a tip. In that way you get smoother application of pigment that works for any tool. And I'm working in little circles technique. Once you get to know me better as an instructor, you'll see that I do mix and match my various shading techniques. Depending on the situation. I never really speak 100% against something or for something. There's a time and a place for everything here. We want very smooth application. We want to gently apply as much of this white charcoal as possible, but we don't want these stroke effects on the page. This isn't a rough sketch. This is actually part of our coloring to assure that it's not random sketch marks all over the place. I am using circular motions to apply this white charcoal onto the lightest parts of my drawing. How am I deciding where to place it In Very basic terms. For those of you who are colorists, I'm applying it to the parts that don't have any gray shading. That's as simple as it gets. And that's certainly an easy rule to follow for any type of gray scale coloring. However, if you are more interested in drawing and painting, and perhaps coloring pages that are not necessarily gray scale, that only have line work, then knowing where to place these white highlights is very important. Where I'm placing them is exactly where the light is falling. We're not going to concentrate on any unusual or dramatic lighting in this course. We'll just do basic, very flattering, very soft, traditional daylight. There won't be any dramatic shadows, there won't be any trick of the light. The light is probably shining from above and onto her cheek bones, more or less from the front of her. These are the parts of her face that will be lit the most. And I'm applying more of my white pigment there when from scratch, and I'm working with a black and white charcoal. This is how I approach my drawing as well. I will make a sketch of the face with all the features with light black charcoal. And then I will apply all the white pigments with my white charcoal. And only then will I go back to create the shadows with more black. The strategy is the same. If you are a person who draws, you know all about this. Don't worry about this looking a little bit stark right now. I know she looks like she has way too much sunblock on. That's not the look that she will end up with, but it is important for us to prime almost the entire face with this white charcoal. We can leave the parts that are heavily shaded on the side here, but most of the rest of the face should have it. Now notice that I'm not just coloring the whole face in white from one part of the face going all the way to the other side. That is not the idea. We don't want a flat white background here. I'm actually building it up to make the face look three dimensional. You see here I worked on the cheek. I'm adding more of the white pigment to the center of the cheek and diffusing the white outward. Same here on the tip of the nose. Same here on this cheek. Already, this is looking more three dimensional than she was without the white charcoal. Keep that in mind as well. We're building a three dimensional character, not just the caricature. We're going for realism here. Remember, ultimately, we want this to look like the digital oil painting that I made. Don't rush this part, take your time. Don't worry about all the little artifacts that you're seeing on the paper by. Zoom this in a little bit, you can see. That the texture of the paper is now very clearly visible because of the white charcoal pigment that I'm applying. Be patient, a trick is coming to clean that up a little bit. But for now, what we need to do is to concentrate on applying just enough of this white pigment. It's extremely important to do this part right now and to do it correctly because once we start applying colored pencils, we won't be able to add white charcoal to them anymore. White charcoal will only go onto a clean page. You can't apply it over colored pencils. Watch this video several times. Watch my hand movements. Watch the decisions that I'm making on where to place these white charcoal effects. Also, you have a PDF download. Don't sweat it too much, if you mess it up, print another one, Try it again. That's the beauty of having PDF downloads. You can try the same effect 1 million times. Okay, that looks great. That's as much pigment as you want on the face. Now for the magic trick now, what I like to do is I like to take a Q tip, just a regular Q tip, and smooth out this white pigment. Again, working in circles. I like to work from the center of the light area and out to the edges. I'm barely applying any pressure. You don't want to grind this into your page? Just lightly stroke the surface of the page in circular motions and it rubs the pigment into the page very nicely, creating this diffused effect. And also notice that all the little artifacts of the paper are suddenly gone. We don't have that scratchy, whitewashed wood look on her face anymore. It's now smooth and it already looks like the beginnings of a painting. Don't worry about going over the lines. In fact, we want that. We're just applying this diffused white powder all over her face. The reason we use tantone paper is because it already establishes the midtone for us. All we have to do now is add the lighter areas and the darker shadows, plus the pigments. The tone is already there. It saves us a lot of time and it introduces an element of unity to the whole image if you want to do it my way. Tantone paper, white charcoal, and colored pencils. Let's take another close look at how this came out. What we did here is we printed our sepia page on tantone paper. We used our white charcoal to gently apply a lot of pigment. The lightest part of the face, the lightest part of the face were of course, suggested by the gray scale picture itself. We decided that this is basic diffused daylight. We only added the white charcoal to the front of our face. No dramatic shadows. We do want the relief effect on the face. For it to look three dimensional, we did have to have gradient variation. It's very pale, it's very subtle. But there is gradient variation on this face. To further smooth out this effect, we used the Q tip. Go ahead and give this a shot. Print your page, grab your white charcoal, apply it to the face. Use the Q tip to smudge it, and we'll continue together when you're ready. 3. Colored pencils (pale skin): I never believed in skin tone sets. As a lifelong artist, I know how to create skin tones. I know that you can possibly put all of the skin tones in every single possible scenario into a single box. First of all, there's an unlimited number of skin tones on the planet. It's not just the gradient of six skin tones, the 12th skin tones or 100 skin tones. Every single person has a slightly different, very specific and unique skin tone. Now take that and consider lighting. Every single person is viewed in and photographed and in very, very specific lighting. So you can't even reproduce that when we draw and paint portraits. Lighting is the single most important thing. You can have a very pale person completely backlit, and then you have to use the browns and blacks and deep purples to create that skin tone. You can have a very dark skinned person completely overexposed and lit with his dramatic lighting. And then you have to use pure white and pink and blue and green even you can have neon light and it goes on and on. You get the idea, it's madness. So literally every single color in every single pencils that is needed to create skin tones. I heard about skin tone pencils. I thought it was just a gimmick. Just another way to make money, sell you something but you don't need. But when I got to know black widow pencils and I personally know the man who, who created the brand. I am not sponsored by black widows by the way, nor will I encourage you to buy black widows if wax pencils and not for you. Don't worry about it. You use any other pencil that you like. But I didn't want to share my story about how I was proven wrong, about my disbelief in skin tones when I receive these from Black Widow. And I opened the boxes, I was very surprised to find a whole bunch of different pinks, some yellows, some greenish tones, gray tones, black, brown, purple. All colors that I as a professional artists use and creating portraits. And these are very small sets. These are just 12 pencils sets. They have such incredible unusual colors that are more than enough to create amazing portraits. There are other skin tones sets out there. I'm not familiar with every single brand, so I won't tell you that this is the best choice on the planet. But for me, these are extraordinary pencils. I don't use them just for skin tones. I use them for a whole bunch of other paintings as well. But having said that, even though this says light-skinned tones and this is dark skin tones, make no mistake. There's no way that you can take a box that just says light skin tones and create a light-skinned tones person portrait. It's impossible. You will need the darker shades for the shadows. You will need your purples and your blues and greens and a whole range of other colors to create a professional portrait, especially if you start playing with lighting. So please do not buy into the idea that this one said is enough to create light skin tones. Likewise, dark skin tones. There's definitely not enough colors here to create a dark skin tone person portrait. You will need other colors, again, depending on the lighting that you're working in. The way that I like to work with this particular set combination is I like to use both of them on any kind of skin tones plus additional pencils. So we will also be working with a whole bunch of other sets of black widows to add additional colors. For instance, I have pure red and some other browns that I have set on the side. 4. First color (pale skin): Alright, now we have the white charcoal part all done. Let's move on to color. Would I like to do when I select my college, is I like to have a piece of scrap paper. And then I actually just take the pencil that looks good to me. And I tested on paper and I see if it is in fact, what I'm looking for. I will test a couple of these. I've decided. Just start with this. This is a color called Olive brown. Again, to bring that point across one more time, this is from the dark skin tone set. Just because it's called dark skin tone doesn't mean that we're working with the dark skin tone. With this olive brown, we will start suggesting the first shadows and you'll already have some of these suggestions with my gray lines. Notice how far back I'm holding my pencil. It's even further than halfway back. There are several reasons for that. The main reason is pressure. You don't want to apply too much pressure to your page. You want to gently glide on the surface. We definitely don't want to destroy the tooth of the paper. The tooth is the texture of the paper. When we talk about 80 pound paper or 90 pound paper, we were talking about how textured it is. It says 80 pound paper, so it has a nice texture to it. You can feel it on the surface with your finger, can run your fingernail over it and you can kind of feel that it's a little bit textured. It's not crazy rich like watercolor paper, but there's definitely texture and we certainly saw it when we applied our white charcoal. And we've got that kind of faded beechwood effect before we used our Q-tip. That's texture. The texture of the paper is very important and very desirable. So when I see colorist on YouTube of preached that you need to press really hard into the paper and flattened the twos. I cringe because it's a big no-no in art, you really don't want to do that. You don't want to flatten the juice of your paper. If you don't like the tooth of your paper, don't use paper that's that TC, find something that's smoother and work with that. But it's important to use your tools correctly. If your paper has a certain amount of tooth, work with it, don't destroy it. When we flatten the tooth of the paper where actually preventing ourselves from adding more layers of pigment. Another thing that I hear a lot from my colorists, from all colorists is I've applied to many layers of pigment and I can't add anymore. I've added three layers of pigment and my paper can't take anymore. I'm going to tell you right now this should never happen if you've applied for layers of pigment to your page and your pH can't take anymore. You're doing something wrong. Unless it's really crappy. Printer paper, like really, really crappy, that should not happen. Professional art paper can take dozens of layers of colored pencil pigment. And that's exactly what we're going to do with these portraits. But the trick to being able to apply all those layers of pigment is applying correct pressure. So we don't want to press on the page at all. We want to glide on the surface of the page. No smashing of the tooth, no grinding the pigment and we're just gliding. And one of the main ways that we can ensure that we're not squishing the paper and adding too much pressure is by holding the pencil correctly. The further back you hold the pencil, the more difficult it is to apply any kind of a pressure with the tip of it. A lot of people tend to hold their pencil too close to the tip the way that they hold a pen. And the closer to the tip you hold it, the easier it is to press onto the page you don't want that, that's, that's bad. That's bad. For your paper. It's a bad habit to get in the habit of holding your pencil correctly, hold it far back, and just get in the habit of gently, gently stroking the page and moving faster than perhaps you used to. That cheating is an excellent technique. I use it all the time. Notice that again, I'm not just coloring from left to right or from right to left. I'm not just doing the outline of the face first, are working only on the eye first, I'm jumping around this page. It may seem counter-intuitive. You may not know where to begin. Where do I store it? I often get asked, do I start with the eyes, do I start with the nose? Notice that I'm literally working on the beach at the same time, which seems almost impossible. But look how fast this is coming together and how am I making these decisions? I'm making them on the spot by evaluating the entire face. I'm looking at the parts that need to be a little bit better tinted. I'm adding my tenth. They're very fast on the spot decision-making. And of course you have your reference picture to work from getting the habit of working faster. You want to apply this shadows as quickly as possible without rushing it. You definitely don't want to make a mess of things. Certainly, if you need to spend more time on it, please spend as much time is needed for you personally. I don't want to preach brushing, but I do want to preach, finding a golden balance for your technique. When I teach my private students, I talk about balance a lot. Everything in art is about balance. It's like you're on a tight rope. You need to know what your personal balance is. Working too slow can prevent you from creating certain amazing effects. Working too fast can lead you into making a mess. You need to find that balance. That's a perfect balance between your main tool, your hands, the little muscles in your hand, what's comfortable for you? What's comfortable for your shoulder, your posture, your actual physical setup. These are all things that I can't control because they are specific to you. So it will only demonstrate how I work. You can take those lessons and apply them to your specific situation. You want to pick your color, your first color, and you want to apply it gently to all of these shadows. And you want to diffuse it with the white charcoal that we've already established. Now, how did I pick this color? The reason that I chose this particular colors because I want it to go with something that's very close to the color of my paper. So a tan color. I wanted it to be a little bit on the yellowish side because I imagined that this character is lit by sunlight, so I want my skin tone to be very warm. I'm going for a natural golden sunlight on very pale skin. So this kind of a yellowish, mustard ocher color is what I chose. And again, the name of this particular pencil is olive brown. From the skin to onset from the dark skin tone set in the Black Widow line. I don't usually look at names. I don't have little charts. I don't actually keep my pencils in the boxes that they belong to. I open these brand new boxes for the sake of the course because they look so attractive when they're brand new. But in reality, I just have all of my pencils and all of my brands just dumped into a single box and all mixed together. I don't look at neither brand names nor pencil names. When I pick a color, I just dig into my box and I get a handful of pencils that more or less match the final outcome that I want. And I test them on the paper just like I showed you. If I like the color than I set it aside and I go with it, I usually pre-select about eight to 12 colors for a portrait. And I work with that. And sometimes I don't use all of them, but it's nice to have options. So notice here that I've added quite a bit of this pigment to my shadows, but I'm also coloring over the white that we've established. Again, using my shading technique, holding my pencil really far back, just shaking the pencil very lightly. You can practice doing it over the page without touching it. And then lowering the pencil to the page and see at what point it starts applying enough pigment to the page that it looks good. And at this point, I'm coloring over everything that's white. But again, I was building it up from the shadows towards the center. Not just left to right, flatly coloring the entire face because it's not a mask, it's a face. It's three-dimensional, it has relief. We definitely want to bring that out on the lips and the eyebrows as well. Even though we'll be adding other colors in the end. But we want this undertone to be universal for the entire portrait. And I'm not going to bother with the neck so much. Mostly we'll concentrate on the face. But I do want to establish this nice shadow under the chin to keep the whole thing looking realistic. Notice also that I'm constantly changing the direction of my strokes. I'm not just sitting in one position and coloring that way. A lot of colorings that I see clearly have the sketch marks in the same direction, which sometimes is acute effect. But ideally you want to get away from that. You want this to look as smooth as possible. Because once again, we're going for a more painting style effect. So why did we prime the whole thing with white? If now we're coloring over it, you may ask. And furthermore, we're coloring over it with a color that's almost identical to our background color. Well, that's the trick. Almost identical, not identical to make this face look three-dimensional and not flat, we want all of these very subtle color variation. And because this is a very pale skin, as we decided in the beginning, it would be, we want the strongest purest saturation of our very pale colors to come out on this page That's a little bit dark. We can go into lighter than the color of the page unless we actually lighten the page. But we also want to keep all of the beautiful mid tones that we have on the background and the hair and then the shadows. So to preserve all that, we chose the tantalum paper that we later primed with white. That's just a stronger effect for those, for those lighter highlights on the face. For the three-dimensional look, most people tend to be a little bit timid when it comes to skin tone coloring, especially colorists. That's one of the reasons why we started with the light skin tone first is because that's, that's already the tendency. So we'll build on top of that. Well, we'll take that timidity and we'll work with it, but will also work through it together. So notice that I'm adding a little bit more pigment to this area right here because I imagine there's a little bit of a shadow caused by the hair, again changing the direction of my strokes so that I don't have the visible lines. And don't worry if you don't add enough of this pigment right now, we can always come back and add a little bit more. That looks very nice because these were wax pencils and because the first pigment is on top of white charcoal, I'll Q-tip will work here again. So once again, I will take a Q-tip, the clean side of it, not the one we used on the white charcoal. And it will smooth out the pencil pigment that I've applied as well. Now this is a very subtle effect. It's not as obvious as it was with white charcoal, but it makes enough of a difference. This is looking very smooth. We don't have any sharp edges on our gradients, on our colors. Still a Cepheids sketch of a face, but the Cepheids sketch is now starting to look a little bit more human, a little bit more three-dimensional. So go ahead and give this a shot. Choose your color. I would go for a beige or a mustard, a light Bronze. Very, very light color, applied very, very lightly just to the shadows that are already suggested with the gray scale around the eyes, around the nose, by the hairline. Very, very gentle color over the white charcoal as well, but super smoothly. Remember to hold your pencil correctly, hold it far back was very, very low pressure and with a very low angle against your page. And finally, when you've applied this color, remember to smooth it out with your Q-tip. Very subtle effect, but I really like it. So go ahead and give this a shot, and when you're ready, we'll move on together. 5. Precision shading (pale skin): All right, This looks really nice. Let's continue with adding some colors. For my next color, I want to choose a middle brown. Chestnut brown. You want this to be Oberyn, chestnut chocolate, that kind of a color. Again, it doesn't matter what set it came from. It doesn't matter what brand it came from. Go with your gut feeling. Go with what your eyes tell you. What is more attractive to you. It's not about matching colors, It's not about one specific palette. The idea is that you want to learn to apply my strategy to any kind of a portrait. For my next color, I chose one that's called rusty, and this is not even from the skin tone, so this is from a monarch Black Widow set in the skin tones. We certainly have no shortage of Brown's, plenty of brands to choose from. There's one that looks very similar to this one as well. But I like this rusty color. It doesn't have to be from a skin tone set. Again, just because a box of pencils says skin tones on it doesn't mean that it will magically create skin tones for you. You do the work. Here. We're applying our darkest shadows plus a little bit of the actual skin tone pigment. There will be a lot of reddish elements in this portrait. She has a dark red hair and she has a little bit of this pinkish kind of makeup around her eyes and her lips as well. And also there's this pink undertone to actual skin. So we do want to find a color that's more on the pink side without using actual pink at this stage. So this kind of a very warm reddish brown is what we want. And notice that now I'm working a little bit slower, a little bit more precise. I'm holding my pencil, not that crazy far back. This is not fast shading anymore. This is precision shading. Physically moved up closer on my pencil to about a third of the way. And my strokes are now smaller, they're shorter. I'm still applying the same amount of pressure, which is barely any. But I am paying more attention to details here. I'm not just applying general shading to the face. This is precision shading. We want it to be precise. So again, a little bit here under the hairline. A lot to the parts that will actually be darkened and eyebrows, eyelashes, lips. We want to prime them with these colors before we move on to something darker. But mainly we want to focus on the shadows around the eyes for this part. Oh my gosh, there's a dog in a studio. Hi puppy. Dog in studio. Shelby will be teaching the next part of this lesson, the shadows around the eye. She knows all about the shadows around the eyes. She's the queen of eyeliner. Back to our program. Did she did she moved my camera. I guess this is why dogs don't teach art lessons. They can't operate the cameras. Once again, even though I'm using a slightly different shading method, precision shading versus fast shading. I am still following my rule of changing the shading direction. Generally, I like to follow the curve of the actual subject. So here we have the curve of the nose and the curve of the eyelid. So I will follow these lines, but not entirely. I will also color across to make sure that the shading is smooth. But I definitely want to go over this crease in the eyelid over several times. Remember what we talked about when we talked about pressure? The tooth of the paper. When you're adding these effects, be patient, I would rather you take several minutes to go over the same area multiple times. Then take your pencil really close and press enter this eyelid to make the crease look really dark because you will prevent yourself from being able to add more colors later on, we do want a lot of colors here. The trick to skin tone coloring is that our skin, no matter what color it is, no matter what shade and variation and then what lighting it is. Human skin picks up a lot of colors. It is somewhat reflective, so we're also picking up the colors that are around us in the room or outside. Their different skin colors within just the space area. Obviously, her lips are a different color in her eyelids are slightly different color. So there's just so much variation here. We can't limit ourselves to just a pale beige and brown for the shadows, which is how portraits end up looking flat as people get timid, like we talked about, and they choose. One pale color and one slightly darker color for the shadows and leave it at that. And that's just not enough. We'll be adding a lot of colors here. And it's important to not block ourselves from being able to do that later on. So don't kill that to speed very careful respect your paper, your paper comes with a certain characteristic. It has that to SUID, work with it. Don't work against it. Don't kill the tooth of your paper. You will just shoot yourself in the foot. So again, going over this crease, this is my favorite part, by the way, is working around the eyes. We'll be adding a lot more colors here. So it's very important to be gentle. And this particular brand, the reason that I love black wheels so much is firstly, I'm a huge fan of working with wax pencils, especially on toned paper, and especially with my white charcoal trick. But I also like how strong the pigment is. If you've seen any of my crystal work, you know that with this brand it's possible to create some astounding effects with just a couple of pencils and hardly any pressure on the page. It's, it's absolutely amazing. So just because we're choosing to make this particular character look very pale, make no mistake. It's not because the pencils unable to produce a stronger pigment. It's because we genuinely want this to be very soft, very gentle, and very, very pale. This shadow under the face is extremely important. This is what makes the face look three-dimensional and obviously closer to us than the neck. You definitely don't want to just give her the dark chin strap. Make sure that the shadow is realistic and that it trails off down to the neck. The other thing that creating this shadow does is that it hides the really sharp outline of the face that I have. The problem with coloring pages, any kind of coloring pages, even grayscale coloring pages, is that you have to have these clean outlines. And normally in drawing and painting, we wouldn't have outlines. When I draw in charcoal, I use sketching as the basis of the final creation. And I do have light outlines in place just to know where everything will go in the end. But I don't actually keep them. The ultimate goal of a drawing is to have no outlines at all so that things look 100% realistic. With coloring pages, it's impossible to avoid because the lines are already there. So they're helpful, but they're also harmful at the same time. So here we will work with the lines as much as we can to stay true to the style of this drawing. Of course, it will be impossible to get rid of all of these lines completely, but we can hide them in our shadow work. I design these pages with this course in mind. I designed them specifically for this course. In fact, I intentionally made the line work as light as possible so that it comes out and when you print it. But so that it also doesn't mess with our actual drawing style. I wish I could show you a closer look. There's no way that I can show you on camera how little pressure I'm applying. Imagine having a feather being brushed against the back of your hand. Literally that much pressure I'm applying right now. I would rather have you go over the same area 1 million times with the same pencil, rather than just do one coat of color but pressing too hard. Notice how she's starting to look a lot more human now. Also notice that the two colors that we've picked, the light mustard color and this chocolate brown color have nothing to do with her actual skin color because her skin is probably very similar to mine, maybe even more pale. And a lot of times when we choose a certain skin color for a character, we make the mistake of picking a color pencil that matches the actual skin color and that's not the way to approach scan. If I was to choose just a pale pink for this portrait and apply it to her face. It wouldn't look natural. That's not what we're actually seeing. We rarely see the actual skin tone on the face. What we see is the light playing off of that skin tone and the effects that the light is creating. And that's what we're drawing. This is the part of the portrait that will take the longest. So normally when I draw and color this part may take up to 30 min with just this one color. Again, don't rush it. Certainly you don't want to work too slow. You don't want to fixate on just one part of the portrait. Try scattering yourself. Like I do. I need a shadow over here that looks attractive. I immediately went over to this side to match it. I added a shadow under the chin and then I added the shadow under the nose. And I'm constantly balancing it. I'm looking over here. I'm actually physically assessing it. I like to step back and see if what I'm drawing actually looks good from a distance. And I see stepping back, physically, stepping back that this part is a little bit more saturated than this part. So I will add more pigment on this side to match. Every single one of these will look completely different. And that's wonderful. It's not just okay, it's absolutely wonderful that your portrait will look different from mine. That every student will produce a slightly different version of this. That's art. It's taking the general technique that I'm teaching you and applying it to your own work with your personal twist on it. So go ahead and pick a nice middle brown, add it to your shadows. And in the next video, we'll do the lips together. So when you're ready, I'll see you there. 6. Lips (pale skin): All right, I hope it went well with the middle brown. Let's paint those lips. Now, lips are tricky. The reason that lives are so much more difficult than the rest of the face is because they tend not to have clear outlines. Here on this coloring page, I suggested basic outlines, but I tried to keep them as light as possible so that the lips don't actually look like they have lip liner on them. If I was to draw this, I wouldn't actually have clean out lines, would use only light and shadow to create lips. But this is a grayscale coloring page, so we have a little bit of an outline to work with. I'm keeping the same pencils. This is still the monarch rusty that I keep calling chestnut or chocolate. The middle brown that we worked with to create the shadows. Same color for the lips, will enhance it later, but it's important that the base color of the lips is the same color that we're using for the shadows of the face. And I'll start with the upper lip. I'm holding my pencil a little bit closer now, about a quarter of the way to the tip. Because now I'm working with a lot of tiny detail. But again, very low pressure. The pencil against the paper can be a little bit more steep now. But all the same rules apply. Remember not to grind your pigment into the page. Don't flatten that tooth. Don't apply more pressure. I would rather have you apply many more layers and some pencils are more friendly than others. Again, the reason that I work with wax pencils is because the pigment is so easily applied to the page. If you find that your tools are not doing what you want them to do, change them out. There's a sea of tools out there of coloring supplies, of drawing supplies. It try it out, read reviews and see what other people were saying. Join OACD communities and talk about other people's experience. I'm certainly not telling you that you should go out and spend all of your money on every single brand and try them all out until you find the one that you like. If you can avoid it, certainly go for it. But I don't think that's the best way. I think try something and if that works, narrow it down. If you like wax pencils. If you've already decided that you like wax pencils, try a different wags brands to see if maybe they can offer something new and exciting to you. Again, talk to other creators out there, or it is a social beast. Talk to other creators, talk to other artists. Alright, back to our lips. Because I'm working with the same color. I'm also adding the shadows under the lip and around the lip with the same color, which creates very natural effect. One of the biggest mistakes that I see in the coloring world with lips is people doing amazing shading techniques on the face and leaving the lips blank only to take a red or pink or purple color and just flatly apply it to the lips and it just destroys the entire illusion of a portrait. Treat lifts like they're made out of the same stuff as the rest of the face, just with a little bit more pigment. And that will solve a lot of your drawing problems and coloring problems. Here again, notice how important it is that this shadow under the lip is the same exact color as this shadow on the upper lip itself. The angle here, the slip is darker because it's it's kind of angled this way and so is this part under the bottom lip, and that's why they're the same color. So that already looks more natural. It's not about picking a color for the lips and applying it. If we want her to have some kind of makeup on, we can add that later, but start with the natural color first. Just like you would apply make-up and real-life same thing with the eyelids. Create the natural effect first, and then add any kind of makeup that she might have on. Here. I'm not playing with the direction of shadows anymore because I want to bring out the texture of the lips. So here we'll have these parallel lines on the lip itself. And I want to follow along those lines to create that realistic lip effect. Again, just one color. I'm not going crazy with any kind of a pigment. No red, no pink, just the same brown. And that's the part, this is the part that scares people, but lips aren't brown. My lips aren't brown. The lips and the final drawing or in brown there clearly kind of reddish. It doesn't matter. You need that undertone that matches the rest of her undertone. And even on the inside, even on the teeth. Adding a little bit of the same color for the shadow. I want the lips to be as diffused as possible without it looking like she has lipstick smeared on her teeth. But a little bit of that color will be reflected in a piece. Teeth are highly reflective. People take that for granted. The teeth for it is also a very difficult part, very tricky part. Because while they are very close to being white, in reality, this kind of an ivory white color. That would be true if we just had a tooth laying on the page? Yes, it would be very, very close to being white. But that's not what we're looking at. We're looking at a whole row of teeth hidden mostly in her mouth. And with this very heavy shadow from her upper lip covering most of them, we won't actually see a lot of white there. We'll just see the shadow on the teeth. We certainly don't want the teeth to make her look awkward. So when it comes to teeth, avoid these clean lines between the teeth because that will just make her look kind of snaggletooth and scary. And avoid pure white. The safest way is to just keep the color of your paper, this tan, tan color and add just a touch of white smudge and a nice gray or brown shadow on the top for the teeth. You probably noticed that we're working on this systematically. We're not switching colors midway were working one color at a time. So go ahead and continue using your brown and color those lips. And when you're ready, we'll continue together. 7. Pink (pale skin): All right, I hope it went well with the lips. Let's add some pink. For my next color. I'm going with a nice soft coral, kind of a pink. This is Saffron from the light skin tone set. Again. What will I say? Sets don't matter of brands, don't matter. Pencil names don't matter. Just pick a nice soft pink or a coral pink. And that's what we're working with. Here. Our skin tone is looking very lovely. Everything looks like a nice old Serbia's sketch, but it's still not looking very much like a painting. It's still kind of in a sketch form. In a drawing form, we need to add some more human colors to this, make it look like it stands out from the back of the page from our background colors. So we're adding this pink because her tone, her skin tone is so pale to begin with, and we've already decided on that kind of a skin color. I'm adding this pink, I'm back to my fast shading techniques. So holding my pencil really far back, almost flat against the page and working rather fast all the way from the edges, going over all the brown that we've established. And towards the center. Very, very gentle, can barely see the pigment applied to the page. But you do see that a difference is happening more around the eyes, under the eyes. Because we're applying this pink over the mustard color and over the brown color. It looks natural. If we had started with this, he would look like maybe he's not feeling so well though it is, it is important to pick the order of your pencils that is ultimately friendly to your character. Make sure you know how your tools work in certain progressions. For instance, some brands are very friendly with lighter tones on top of darker tones like prismacolor is great for that. You can add a lot of very light colors on top of already very dark colors that you established on your page. But other brands like wires or not so friendly with that, they are much better at starting from light tones and adding darker ones on top. So know your tools, know your tools well, be friends with your tools and trust them, and also make notes. If you discovered something, if you discovered that a certain, this one Denzel from this one said works beautifully when mixed together with this one other pencil. Make a note of it, keep a journal. And that will be your trick, that will be your trademark in the drawings and colorings to come. So notice that she's starting to look a little bit more, more lively now. This pink in combination with a yellowish tone and the chocolate tone is creating that beautiful pale skin effect. So none of these colors are the color of her actual skin. We're building an illusion. We have to work with just light and shadow, not the skin tone over the lips as well. And of course, on the neck. Once you introduce a new color, it's important to apply that color all over. For instance, I'm now introducing this nice pink. I didn't just add it to the nose or just two cheeks, or just to the eyelids. I'm adding it everywhere. That consistency is extremely important in portrait drawing and coloring. Now the amounts of these colors that I'm adding vary. But the color itself has to appear everywhere for the illusion to work a little bit less to the lighter areas, a little bit more to the darker areas, even more to the ports where I believe she'll be wearing some kind of a pink or brown makeup. And of course, a little bit more to the lips because ultimately we want them to be brighter. A little bit less to the neck, actually, because the neck is mostly in shadow, so a lot of this color will actually be lost there. But it's important to add some of it. Again so that the overall color is consistent. That's it. It doesn't take that much. Make sure not to overdo the pink part. You don't want the face to look red or pink or flushed or anything. We just want to enhance the colors that we already established. So pick a nice soft pink. Don't go crazy begging really bright pinks, know, neon's at all. Nothing on the heavy side. Just to a middle pink, a lighter pink, but obviously pink or coral. And add it over your shadows. And when you're ready, we'll go ahead and enhance those shadows even further together. 8. Purple (pale skin): Okay, The skin tones are looking lovely, but the shadows can use a little bit of work. Let's see what we can do. Now, the thing about shadows is that they always appear a little bit bluish or purplish to the human eye. That's how we know that it's a shadow and not just the change in pigment. So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to add a little bit of this kind of grayish purple color. This is called washed purple, and this is from the dark skin tone set from black widows. And this is exactly what I was talking about when I was praising the sets, is the fact that they have this kind of a color selection in them. This is obviously not a skin tone. But whoever, whoever holds Albert create this set is definitely an artist and definitely understands the elements that are needed in creating realistic portraits. Shadows tend to be purple. And this washed purple is perfect for our purposes. We're adding it now over the areas that we've already colored with brown and with pink. And we're making them into this purple color. And that right there is the single most important step in making shadows look more realistic. Now, it doesn't have to be this wash purple color. It can be any other kind of purple. Even blue will work beautifully for shadows. This is a little bit on the timid side. I would even go with a brighter purple for the shadow. But remember we're starting timid and we're building up our confidence with this very pale skin model, moving up to darker skin and darker skin. And building up our skills and building up all confident for more amazing skin tone affects. See the difference that it makes a little bit just a touch of purple and the shadow, night and day. Now it's no longer a flat drawing. Now it's starting to look like a painting. A touch of purple is magic for portraits. Do not underestimate this step and do not skip this step. This is extremely important. It's scary. There's no purple in the skin tone at all. It's only in the shadows and it's only an illusion. But that's what we do when we draw, when we call it, we create illusions, Two-dimensional illusion of something three-dimensional. So you must keep that perspective in mind when you create these effects. They're not real. You're not recreating the color of the skin. You recreating the illusion of a three-dimensional object. So working now with this color, what is this, our third voice color, it's suddenly becoming very obvious why we didn't want to destroy the tooth of the paper. Why we want it to be so gentle without pressure and with our color application. Because at this point, if I had already prostitutes of my paper and I would not be able to apply this effect. That's it. Like the eyebrows would have been ruined, the eyelids would have been ruined. I wouldn't be able to add any more colors to them to do be careful, because ultimately I add anywhere 6-12 layers of different colors to my portraits. You want to be able to do that to create these amazing effects. To create these realistic effects. It's not about working from one edge to another, picking the perfect colors as you go. It's not a mosaic tile work. We're approaching it the same way that I approach oil paintings one layer at a time. Now, granted, with oil paintings, I would actually start even darker and keep applying my lighter effects on top. But that's a slightly different story. We are working with pencils on paper. So certain adjustments had to be made. Again, the same rule applies. We introduced a new color. We have to introduce a new color to everything that skin on this drawing. So off we go the rest of the face, the neck, the mouth, the nose, everything. All you have to do is decide where you need more of this color and where you need less of it. So what do we do? Work from our reference photo. Thankfully, you already have the painting that I've created for you, so you can use that as a reference. But if you're working on something completely unrelated, if you're just taking this knowledge to apply it to your coloring of other artists work, of your own work. You know completely different characters than I highly recommend that you do some research on photography. Pick a character whose skin tone you want to mimic, the lighting that you want to mimic and work from that. Don't copy directly. Take notes on what's important, the important elements. Pre-select your colors. Pick a photograph that your inspiration photo for your coloring page. And three, select the colors that you believe will be needed to recreate that effect. And work systematically. Don't just try to blend everything on Canvas, on paper. Work one color at a time, building up your tones. That way you can keep everything consistent that way. There are no surprises that way you don't have one I different from an other eye or the nose being a completely different color than the rest of the face, you need consistency and skin tones. The way that you secure that is by working systematically one color at a time. More to the shadow here under the lip. Remember we don't actually want clean outlines on the lips. So I'm working over this outline in both directions, applying my shadows, making them darker and darker every time so that ultimately, I don't have these outlines at all or have as little of them visible as possible. But notice that I'm continuing to treat the lips like they're made out of the same stuff as the rest of her. Just a little bit darker. So all the same colors. Nothing new. If I want the lips to look a little bit more reddish in the end, we'll add a little bit more red in the end, but not now, we don't start with that. Any strong color that you want on your page. You need to build up. You need to invest into it with multiple layers. Don't just start with it. Otherwise, it will look flat and unnatural. A lot of this washed purple to the neck and the chin. Okay, another layer done, give it a shot, find a nice middle purple. That's, again not obscene. Don't go for like the Prismacolor, deep purple. That's just this beautiful, absolutely beautiful amethyst purple. But it's not the right thing for this. For this you want something more diffused, more pale. Wash purple is perfect. Lots of other purples and lots of other sets will work just as well. Maybe even a blue, like a grayish blue will also work here. Give it a shot when you're ready. We still have a lot of work to do on the shadows. 9. Contrast (pale skin): Alright, shadow work continues. The purple made this look amazing. But I feel like it's still needs a lot of definition, so we need a darker color. For my next color, I picked a really dark brown. Now this, this should be super easy. All of the coloring pencils sets have dark brown colors, just in the Black Widow sets. They're probably 20 to 30 dark brown colors between all of the sets. The one that I happen to take is a color called mud from the dark skin tone set. But again, there's so many colors that are very similar to this in pretty much any pencil set. So this should be a no-brainer, very, very dark brown. And what I'm actually going to start with, with this dark brown is her eyebrows. And here I am not really shading anymore, but rather drawing. So notice that my fingers yet again creep closer to the tip of the pencil because I'm working with detail rather than shading. So a lot closer, I'm applying a little bit more pressure here. But once again, not grinding into the page, no. No paper is being harmed in the process, the tooth isn't being watched. But I am working along the line work, color these eyebrows and it definitely want this part closer to the bridge of the nose to be a little bit darker than the part that goes out to the edge. And it's this contrast definition that will make her skin look as pale as we actually want it to look. Because everything that we perceive, we perceive by contrast. So by adding really dark effects at her eyebrows will be really dark or eyelashes will be really dark. The creases around her I, eyelids will be very dark or lips will be much darker. And of course, ultimately her hair will be this dark red, nearly black color. All of these things will add to the illusion of a very, very pale skin. He really wanted to exaggerate this crease in the eyelid. For me that is just very attractive for this particular portrait. And also starting to add more pigment to her eyelashes. Be a little bit of an outline on the eye. Color in the iris itself. Same thing on the other side. When it comes to eyes, I always like to balance them immediately. As soon as I make any kind of an effect on the left, I immediately move over to the right eye and the other way around so that my effect a balanced and are done with the same pencil. More under the eye. Over here. You can see how this definition with this very dark pencil is making the rest of her face look very pale by contrast. But still with a lot of color variation. Pale doesn't mean lack of color, it just means very pale colored. So look at this part right here. This is very dark brown and it's on her skin. So don't be afraid of adding the strong shadows. And this is very strongly leading into the next section when the skin tone itself will be much darker. So we'll have to be braver with our colors. Here. Again, leading into the edges of the face, making the shadows stronger. This is the shadow that I really wanted to enhance back in the chocolate brown phase and exaggerate the cheekbone. Notice how I automatically switched to my fast shading technique without even realizing it. I'm working on a different part of the face now this is the cheekbone. Bigger area of wider area, more surface area to cover. And immediately my fingers crept up to the back of the pencil and a switch to my fast shading technique versus my drawing technique that I used on the eyelid. Keep an eye on that. When you're coloring. Don't just get locked in, in one position. Keep that variation and over time it will come naturally to you. I didn't even notice that I did that just now. Again, more detail here, so closer to the tip for that little bit more control, a little bit more pressure. Not too much as always. And of course, constantly changing the direction of shading. Noses are also very tricky. Even more tricky than lips, I would argue, because they are very few actual outlines. We only really have outlines over here on the nostrils, on the wings. And we have, we tend to have, with basic lighting, we tend to have this shadow on the tip of the nose, a little bit under the tip of the nose. And of course, this part over here as well on the upper lip. That's looking very good under the chin. Remember this is a very important shadow, very underrated. But we don't want it to look like a chin strap. We want to really invest the time into defusing the shadow all the way down into this triangle pattern. So practice your shading, private practice your smooth shading technique, you're fast shading technique. And at this point, all of these layers of colors that we've established are working in our favor because I have so many layers of wax on the page. My pencil is now gliding on the surface of the paper, even smoother. I barely need to do any work here. I'm just touching the page and pigment appears. So all that work that we did in the beginning is really paying off. Now, this shadow right here is what makes the face look like. It's actually rounded and the chin look like it's actually rounded because no matter how wonderful you make this shadow on the neck. If you don't create the secondary shadow on the chin, the face will look like a flat mask. It may be counter-intuitive. I know, I know it's really scary to add these dark colors to the pale skin tone. But that's how we see shadow work. And now some more definition to the lips. Still with my dark brown pencil, this is mud. Again, fingers crept up to the tip. We're doing more detail work. Adding a little bit of this dark color here to the inside of the mouth because that's the part that's just hidden in darkness over there. Very important element to make the mouse look realistic, such a tiny detail and makes such a huge difference. A little bit more to the corners, corners of the mouth, a little bit more to the shadow. A bit of an outline for this part of the lip. And at this point, I'm going to add some pigment to the hair. Because now the hair is looking a little bit too washed out. And it's difficult to see all of the beauty of the face pigments that we've created because of this very unnatural and flat looking here, I'm going to switch to my rusty brown. And I'm going to add just a little bit of this pigment around the face. I'm now gonna do the whole hair because it's not a hair lesson. And because you already have your reference image, my oil painting, but I'll do just enough of it around the face so that you can see how the skin tones that we've picked work with the hair color. Okay. You see how adding the pigment to the hair changed the entire look of the face. This is why I don't like to do the skin tone first, then the hair. The hair than the skin tone. Generally when I draw and I paint, I work on the whole thing at the same time. Now I didn't want to distract you with hair because this is a skin tone. Listen. But it is important to know that everything has to work together. The hair color adds to the skin color of the skin color reflects the hair color. It's an extremely important element. So, especially if you're feeling a little bit lost, if you're working on your skin tone and you're like, I'm not really sure if it's looking realistic or not. Start the work on the hair and see how this hairline around the face works with the skin tone, you will make a huge difference. So go ahead and spend some time on this step, see if you can add a little bit to the hair, try it out. And let's continue working on this thing together. When you're ready. 10. A touch of fire (pale skin): Now comes the really fun part. Let's add some red. Red, actual pure red. Now the skin tone sets that I'm working with don't come with red. So I had to go digging in my other boxes. And the reds that I picked, Our, this very classic red, this is called fire from the cobra set. And this is another one that I picked, that's a more burgundy red. This is called Blood Diamond, also from the cobra set. And I picked the burgundy one mainly for the hair and the lips and the makeup. But we'll start with this classic red and we'll start adding this red around the eyes. Even if she didn't have this very pale pink makeup, I would still add a little bit of red around the eyes and around the lips, and even a little bit to the cheeks and nose. But be very, very careful here. Read only works at this stage because we have so many layers of pigment on this page already. And because these were wax pencils and it's so easy to glide on them. It seems scary, right? We're adding actual pure red. This beautiful skin tone that we've established. It's scary. I get it. It's even scary for me after all these years of drawing and painting portraits. But it's a very cool step. And it does make her look more human. And a little bit, maybe a little bit flushed because her skin is so pale. We're going specifically for pale red heads skin that we want to bring out more of the pink tones. I prefer to bring out the pink tones by adding red overweight rather than bringing more pink pencils. That's just me, that's my personal preference. You may build up these colors with various pinks and browns. That works too. But for me, I really like a gentle wash of pale red rather than a pencil that's actually pink and we're adding a lot of it. So all of these are distinct decisions that are now yours to make. This is now your project. You have my page, but what you do with it is entirely up to you. I'm only arming you with the tools that I myself use. You may choose to use only parts of them. You may choose to use them in different ways than I use them totally, entirely up to you because you are now the artists and command. That's another term that I use with my private students. You are the artists and command. You make the decisions. Always with my little Q-tip. And this red is our exception to the rule. The rule of if you introduce a new color, you have to use it all over. Red is the first color that that rule doesn't apply to. I want this read only in the areas of higher interest and specifically for this kind of skin tone. So here I'm only adding it around the eyes. Choose ellipse into the hair on the lips. Notice what this red does to the lips. Imagine if we just started with red without building up all of these natural tones, it would look completely different and completely flat. Adding the red on top really looks like the lips is slightly tinted, but it doesn't look like they're flat little red cardboard cutouts. You can't easily tell if this is light makeup or the natural color of her lips and her eyelids. That's exactly the look that I want to go for. The other thing that this red is doing, it's also creating higher contrast, something we've already been working on on this piece. And higher contrast in these areas of interests, areas of high detail makes the skin look more pale. By comparison. Very red lips obviously will make the skin look more pale. Very dark hair will make the skin look more pale. Pale doesn't mean boring. There's a lot of play of color in here. There's a lot of definition, lot of three-dimensional effects. Going to add a little bit of this red to this shadow underneath because of reflections. Just a touch. I'm going to add a little bit of this red to the tip of her nose. Just a little bit. Don't go crazy. We don't want her to look like a drunk. We just want a touch of blush on the nose and a touch of blush on the cheeks. So I'm going to add a little bit of this red over here. Be very, very careful here. You don't want this to actually look red. We don't want red blush on her face. We want a little bit of a pink blush on her face, but a lightly applied red looks more natural than a strong reapplied pink in my experience. And that's it. That's all that we're going to do with. Well, you can play with the hair as well, but I'll see you in the next part for the final detail. 11. Shades (pale skin): Okay. I've added some more red to the hair. Again, normally I would do the entire head of hair, but this lesson is on skin tone, so I don't want to get carried away. The only thing that's important here is that we can see how the color of the hair weeks with the color of the skin. So for the purposes of this particular stage of our coloring, this is more than enough. We see that the color of the hair is reflected in the skin tones and in the makeup. So for our final effect, we will increase the shades of our colors by adding some black. This black is from the dark skin tone set, and this is called midnight. I think all of Black Widow sets have a black color in them except for the monarch set, but all of them have black. And pretty much every, every single colored pencil said it has black in it. Very simple colors to compile obviously. And it makes it match my brands as well. So if I didn't find a black widow black, I could have used Prismacolor or a Lyra. Actually really like using layers over, over black widows as well. But I use my black always as the last possible pigment in most of my drawing and coloring. And the reason that it's always the last is because I'm using black not to color the areas that are actually physically black, but to increase the shade of any given color because that's what black does. Adding a certain amount of black to a color increases its shade. 10%, 20%, 30%. 508100100 is of course, pure black. But you get the idea. So here we already have very strong colors established. Even though this is a pale skin characters. She has very bright lips, very bright eyes, very bright here, ultimately should have right here. So now we will only add this black to increase the strength of certain colors. For instance, here this crease in the eye shadow by adding just a little bit of black over it. It's not black, it's not solid black. But all of those colors that we've created a suddenly that much darker. And it's very important to have all those layers of colors so that this trick right here works. Everything that we've done so far has been leading up to this. Again, here on the eyebrows are already brown, but adding a little bit of black to the parts that I want to be darker gives them a little bit more shape. To balance out. Eyelid on the other side. Of course, the eyelashes, I actually want to be black. So I'm going to go over them. Nearly black. We have some brown in them already. A little bit more definition here in the corner of the eye. I want to enhance the shadows under the eyes. A little bit of black there. Anything, any kind of a shadow effect that you want to make stronger? Now is the time to do it. You don't have to find pencils that match your color perfectly. This is another mistake that color is often make. They get these sets that are 200 pencils, 500 pencils. And it all looks so delicious that you have every single one of these tones of brown in there. But it's too distracting. It's too much to choose from. Build up your colors with basic pigments and then make them darker by adding black, It's a much better effect. Here again, I'm going to add more black around the face to the shadow of the hair. Ultimately, this will be dark burgundy, so it would actually be a very beautiful dark burgundy color. But right now I'm just, I'm just making it a dark shadow. In this dark shadow also helps me eliminate the outline of the face. Remember, we talked about outlines in the beginning of part one, about how it's very difficult to create coloring pages without outlines. But ultimately in drawing we don't want clear outlines. So to make this coloring page look more like a drawing, more like a painting, ultimately, we want to hide as many outlines as we can. And we do that by adding very dark pigment around them in these gradients. Here I will. It's kind of hard not to get carried away with the hair. And I want to add more burgundy here, but now I have to stop, stop. And this is the ultimate demonstration of how high contrast makes the skin look really pale. The higher the contrast of the elements of interests like hair, eyes, lips, eyebrows, the higher the contrast there, the more obviously pale the skin looks. There's some really beautiful reds and the Black Widow set. So it's very hard for me not to, not to just switch to coloring the hair because it would look absolutely gorgeous. This shadow under the chin, I keep working on it. In enhancing it with black is a very powerful move at this point. But makes sure that the colors that are underneath the black. Stronger than the black because we definitely don't want black to look black or gray. We want to very gently and very skillfully, and hence the shade of brown that we've established. Notice that it looks natural just like the red when we added read, it didn't look red on the face. It looked like blush. Same thing we're adding black and out. Very scary, very dangerous. You don't want to overwork it. But very, very important without it, the whole thing, they look too flat. We do want this level of definition and look how this outline is disappearing now. Because we're bringing the black all the way up to it. That looks very professional. That's the look that you want. Very important that the black that you're adding doesn't look like gray. Definitely want to enhance this shadow and do some more work on the lips with the black. Again, this black is not actually black. It's just an enhancement of a shadow. Very, very important distinction. If we will work on the lip separately in a lot of colorists like to big things in step first to the eyes, then do the lips. I would highly disagree with that, with that strategy. It may work for some. I'm not saying don't do it, don't try it. But for me, there are too many disadvantages in that strategy. Building everything up together is a much stronger move. In my professional opinion, in my professional lifelong experience. Build it up layer after layer rather than element after elements. At this point I'm just assessing the whole thing. Again, I'm actually physically standing up and stepping away from my drawing To see if it looks good from the distance. And if it does, then I don't want to overwork it. It's hard to stop sometimes as you can see, I'm still struggling with not working on the hair because I do want to see it completed. And once you see the whole thing done with this, this is my area of concentration right now. So I see that this eyebrow needs a little bit more work because it's unrealistic that the shadow would fall here and wouldn't fall on the eyebrow. So this needs to be adjusted. And notice that I'm not switching colors. I'm not bringing in deeper reds for the red. I'm not bringing in deeper browns for the brown. I'm just adding black to everything equally because that's how we adjust the shades. For these elements. It's important to practice having a very light hand. Do practice holding your pencil in different ways so that you don't apply too much pressure like we talked about in the beginning. So I'm going to call this done. I've completed the hair and you can tell right away what an important part the hair place. You can see the burgundy color of her hair is now clearly accented and all of those nice red tones that we used on the face here kind of brings everything together. So what did you think? Did you have fun? Try it out. Follow my method step-by-step. Remember we started with white charcoal and we started building up our colors. Washed the lessons again. Every single lesson comes with a PDF with notes and with pictures, my progress pictures. You also have the downloads for this page. You will have the downloads for the pages to come. Take your time with us. Go through this course at your own pace. Try out different effects, try out different prints. You have a PDF to Print, you can print ten copies, 20 copies, and try out different effects. But do try to match my process and my tools as much as possible. So definitely toned paper, but it doesn't matter what brand of tones paper, definitely colored pencils, doesn't matter what brand of colored pencils you get the idea. Give this a shot, and when you're ready, we'll move on together to olive skin tones. And that's a completely different ballgame. Similar effects, similar strategies. Of course, shading effects are going to be consistent throughout, but the approach to darker skin tone is a little bit different. However, it is important to understand the approach to a lighter skin tone before we move on. So do spend some time on this lesson. When you're ready. We'll move on together. 12. White charcoal (olive skin): Hello and welcome to part two of coloring skin tones. In this section, we'll concentrate on the olive skin tone, will approach it a little bit differently from how we did the pale skin tone. So I hope you had fun with your pale skin tone. I finished mine with the hair and I'm quite happy with it. Let's move on to Olive. Just like with the pale skin tones, we'll start with our white charcoal. Now, white charcoal has nothing to do with the final outcome of the skin tone. Whether you're doing a light tone, mid-tone, a dark tone. The white charcoal serves a very specific purpose of being a primer so that we have our highlights established and so that the colors that we're applying to the face, I add their best possible potential and pure saturation. So even if we get to really dark brown shadows, dark purple shadows, black even we still need to have a layer of white charcoal just to ensure that all the transitions and nice and soft plus like we talked about in part one, the white charcoal allows for slightly smoother blending of wax pencils that are applied on top of it. So let's do this part together. It may seem a bit overwhelming, knowing that the skin is going to be a little bit darker, actually darker than the actual color of this page. But we're starting with white charcoal. I know it's a little bit weird, but exactly as we discussed in part one, the whole point for working with this medium is to establish those highlights. And this is exactly how I work when I worked with white and black charcoal, withdrawing was just freehand drawing from scratch. I would make a sketch similar to this and then I will establish my lightest areas and my darkest areas. We already have the darkest area established with my line work and my shadows. You don't have to worry about that. The purpose of these lessons to teach you where to place late and which colors to choose for the skin tones. Because most of you, I imagine a colorist, some of you are probably illustrators. You may be an artist. You may not have any idea what adult coloring is, but you'd like to draw portraits with color, with colored pencils. This course is for you. And of course if you already know how to draw it, and this is exactly why we skip the, how to construct the face stage and went straight to coloring. This is all about how to achieve the skin tone, not how to build up the face, but the beautiful part about white charcoal is that you can't add too much of it. Even if you feel like you've added too much, like you made the face too late. It doesn't matter because first of all, it can easily be removed. You can use a kneaded eraser if you really desperately need to remove some of this pigment, this works great on removing white charcoal as well as regular black charcoal. And I wouldn't even bother with that if I add too much, which happens sometimes I overwork this part and I add way too much white, way more than I need. If that happens, I just leave it. I just leave it and then I add all the colors that I need to cover the areas that are too light. So don't worry about it. But the thing that I would like you to pay attention to is just like in part one on our light skin tone. I'm not just blindly, systematically coloring from left to right, from one corner to another, making this flat white mask, I am building up a three-dimensional shape that is very important, that carries a long way. It will show all of this detail work that you're putting in right now. We'll show in the end, it will come through as something that you took care of that you actually put a lot of attention into. So don't rush this part. This is the single most important investment in our coloring stage. Take your time. The lighting here again is very soft daylight lighting. I imagined straight on her face and slightly from above. So nothing extreme. There will be no dramatic shadows, just basic soft lighting, which is the most common type of lading. And of course, this is the type of lighting that you would generally have in a portrait. I strategically drew these models facing forward as they would be if they had their picture taken for a profile photo maybe or, or something like that. Obviously not a passport photo. These are a little bit more creative than that. There's a slight tilt of the head, but mostly they are facing forward. So generally when photographers pick this pose, they also have very, very basic leading. Clearly illuminates the face from the front and leaves these very attractive shadows around the face on the cheekbones. The rule of thumb here is that I'm adding more white to the areas that are clearly protruding. Her cheekbones are closer to us. Her eyelids are bent this way. The tip of her nose is the closest to us, so it is the lightest. This part on the lip will be shiny and is also a convex surface. And of course, the chin. I'm working from my reference image. Remember that I've actually created these characters as digital oil paintings, which you have. Please pull them up on a separate screen or print them and use them as your reference for where to place light and shadow. Notice that I didn't cover the entire face with white charcoal. That is because I'm switching to my Q-tip. And acute it will do all the blending from it. So even though I didn't color these tiny areas over here that are shaded, I can pick up enough of the pigment from the really wide areas and actually transfer them onto this part of the face. So now I'm just going to very gently smoothes all of this white charcoal, keeping the lighter areas lighter, keeping the darker areas slightly darker, but nevertheless covering the entire face with some amount of this white charcoal. Again, because I want that nice base for texture as well as for color saturation. Alright, that looks nice. That's all we're going to do for the white charcoal part. Remember, white charcoal doesn't need any kind of fixers. You can run your hand over this and nothing. No smearing, no smudging the white YouTube, really the worst Q-tip. Any color you choose. Nicely locks it into the page. So go ahead and print your copy. I highly recommend that you try to sit here on tantalum paper and apply a layer of white charcoal. And when you're ready to move on to color, will continue to get it. 13. Starting dark (olive skin): All right, by now I imagine you are a pro with white charcoal, so you're probably ready to move on to color. But this one, I'm going to show you a different strategy. Remember that with pale skin tones, we went from later tones to slightly darker to slightly darker until we got two really exciting colors like red. And that's one way of approaching skin tones. You build up your colors to balance for their timidity that we talked about. A lot of colorist, especially colorists, are quite timid with skin tones, which is why we started with pale. I want to take this opportunity, this amazing golden olive skin tone to show you how to work from darker to lighter. So for my first color, I chose this new pencil from the dark skin tone set, and this is called nigra. This is a nice dark brown like a deep chocolate brown color. And with this brown, I'm going to establish my darkest shadows. This is exactly how I work when I draw with charcoal. I like to start around the eyes. We're going straight to precision shading on this one. I'm holding my pencil about midway. You can hold it a little bit closer if you wish. I find that the further back I hold my pencil, the faster I'm able to move it. If I hold it really close, then I'm kind of going at a lot slower, so it's great for detail. But I control the speed with which I shade. By how far back I'm actually holding my pencil here about midway from my comfort level. But you find yours. Remember to vary the directions of strokes that way the color appear smoother on paper. And again, because this is very basic, very diffused, straight on lighting, the shadows will be more or less symmetrical on both sides of the face. So it should be very easy. Of course, my line work is guiding you. When working with symmetrical faces and with balanced lighting like this. I like to match my left and my right side as I go. Meaning I'm not just going to color the entire left eye and the eyebrow, and the eyelids and the cheek and everything. And then move over to the right. I tried to balance the elements. For instance, I worked on this shadow on the bridge of the nose towards the eyelid and immediately a balanced it with the same shadow on the right side. This way I know that I can keep things consistent, imbalanced, don't have to be identical. In fact, you can see that this face is clearly not perfectly symmetrical, but I like that it shows realism. This one of course is based on a real person. So I used a lot of photography of this actual model for reference when I created the painting. I'm going to color over the eyebrows as well. Pretty much everything that's in shadow here. We want to replace the shadows of the gray scale drawing with this brown. I'm going over the white parts, the really white part a little bit, but not a lot. I'm creating a smooth gradient from this dark brown to white. And how dark you want to go with this is entirely up to you. It depends on how dark you want your skin to be. But remember, if you want to go darker, don't use more pressure, you use more layers. Again, I made an effect on the right side here. I immediately go to the left side. Just like with a light-skinned tones will be working in one color at a time. That doesn't change. You can change the order of your colors. Of course, like we talked about already, we can start with lighter tones and build-up to darker ones or vice versa. Neither way is correct. I am showing you both so that you can make up your own mind. But the important part is to do it in steps. If you're adding a color, add that color everywhere, make sure that you liked the distribution. You liked the saturation, like the shading effects. If you're happy with that, move on to your next color and make sure that each new layer of color somehow enhances the previous one. Notice that I'm just freely going over the hair here. I'm not trying to color around it because the hair is ultimately going to be a much darker colors. So it doesn't matter if we cross. In fact, I'm going to start shading the hair with the same color right away and will build up the darkness as we go. But it's important that the whole composition has that same undertone. In this case, it's this chocolate brown. Just like in the previous section. I'm not going to go crazy coloring the entire head of hair at this stage just enough around the face to give you an idea how it all works together. And then at some point behind the scenes, I will complete the hair and show you the finished result. But you get the idea, this is a sappy or drawing right now, we're using only two colors, white and brown. Only to establish where the light hits the face and where the shadows form. Because we're building up so much more pigment than we did on the pale skin. This is going to take quite a bit longer. Don't rush it, get in the zone and just enjoy the shading. This isn't a race. You don't have to make these effects really fast. You don't have to complete these colorings within a few hours or a few days. Take as long as you need, work at your own pace and have fun. This is supposed to be relaxing and therapeutic. For those of you who are adult colorists, most of the portraits that you'll be working with will be considerably smaller. Most coloring pages come with smaller characters, are full body characters that just have tiny faces. You can apply all the same techniques just on a smaller scale. But obviously it will take a lot less work, a lot less strokes on the page. So a face that's this big will probably take you just a few minutes to complete. But since this is a full-size portrait, it will take us a few hours. I apologize about these lines that appear on all of my friends. This is not in the file, this is an artifact in my actual printer at home. Everything that I print, it comes with this line. I need to pull out my, I guess the cylinder and see if there's something stuck to it or I guess there are something that's rubbing on the actual ink rollers and it's creating this line every single time. So again, you won't have this in your file. This is very specific to my machine. I'm just going to try to fill it in and hide it like I did another one. Remember this shadow under the chin? Very important. This is what makes the face looks three-dimensional. This point, you know, the various shading techniques that I use. So you can see that I'm just naturally switching to my fast shading technique on the areas of the face that have less definition. The jaw, the chin. There's there's nothing here. There's no detail, not like we had around the eyes. So here it's okay to go faster. And I'm going to leave the lips uncolored for now because I want to do them together in a separate lesson. So let's just add the shadows everywhere but the lips for now. And then we'll concentrate on the lips specifically. And I almost forgot her freckles. She has these beautiful freckles on her cheeks. We'll use the same color to go over them. You can freehand these as well. I imagine they're more freckles on her face that I've actually established here with my line drawing. Can add as many as you want. You can make them bigger and add more of them, can make tiny ones. Totally up to you. And I'm also going to color in the eyes. Ultimately she will have dark brown eyes. Okay, go ahead and do this. Pick a nice dark chocolate brown pencil, not the darkest one in your box, but a rich brown, not a middle brown, not a dark brown somewhere in-between. A nice rich chocolate brown. And go ahead and add your shadows around the eyes, the eyebrows, around the nose, cheekbones, ears, neck. You can finish the hair if you want. Leave the lips. Let's do them together when you're done with this part. Remember, at any point during this journey, feel free to send me photos of what you're working on. You have any questions at all, or if you just want feedback. Remember, I'm a real person, not just the recording. 14. Lips (olive skin): Okay, I hope this one, well, I hope you have your nice dark brown shadows established. Let's talk about those lips with the same dark brown pencil. Let's work on some shadows that actually built up the lips. Remember, in real-life, lips don't actually have outlines. So these lines that I've drawn for you that are kind of guidelines, we're going to extend the shadows on both sides of the line. So it's going to be a diffuse gradient that goes from dark brown and a center to lighter up in later down. Every little pressure shadow under the lip will be darker just because of the way the we have our lighting established in the lipids self will be a little bit later. It's very important to work with the same pencil here, no new colors yet. This part right here, this tiny little part right, right under the lip. That's always the darkest part. A ways. Obviously, if she has a flashlight or campfire laid right under her face, it will be a completely different a completely different scenario. But in this kind of leading from the front, from the top, That's always the darkest part. Same thing on the top here. We can go around the lip, not necessarily outlining it, but adding shadows around it. And now for the lips themselves, they will be a shadow on this lower part of the upper lip. Here I like to follow the lines that are the actual texture lines of the lips and darker towards the corners of the mouth. The corners of the mouth or in extremely important element in making this part of the face look realistic. Make sure to not bring whether you're drawing or coloring. Don't bring the line of the upper lip and the line of the lower lip together into this nicely fitted corner that just looks FAPE unless she's wearing lip liner, that will never happen. You see how this outline kind of gets diffused when we get to the corner? Same here. The top outline gets totally diffused. There is no definition there. The only thing that we have, these little corner of the mouth shadows right here. Again, working with the lines of the actual texture of the lips. Another shadow over here, darker towards the corners. Bit of a shadow on the teeth. And cute. And that's it. This part of the lips is done and now we're done with this pencil color altogether. 15. Olive color (olive skin): I hope you had fun with those lips. Let's move on with color. For my next color. I chose this. This is kind of a greenish olive color in the Black Widow sets. There are a lot of these beautiful colors in the skin tone sets as well as in other sets. This one is called leather and it's from the dark skin tone set. But there are others as well. There is this beautiful, absolutely beautiful pencil that I like to use cold all of gold. We may actually use this later on. There's also olive brown, a lot of choices. And if you're working with other brands, same thing. They're usually this type of pencils in most professional pencil sets. So something that's actually very similar to the color of all paper, but a little bit darker and a little bit more in the mustard side. With this color, I'm going to go over everything that I've already made in brown and everything that I've already colored in white, blending it together, making the brown pop and adding this more natural glow to the face. We don't want anything that's pure white on her face. In the end. This is a gorgeous color. I use this color for skin tones all the time. All sorts of skin tones, not necessarily dark or light. Remember that the lighting also directs a lot of the color choices. It's not all about the skin color itself. It's about where the skin color is displayed. It's a little bit on the yellow side, which I like. It makes you think that she's lived by natural light, like sunlight and warm tones, light is usually more flattering for portraits. So if you have an option, go with warmer colors. The reason I started with a darker brown and I'm now adding this beautiful olive color is because there's so much dark brown and the olive is now serving as a blender. Again, personal preference, either way would have worked. You could have started with this color and then added the dark brown shadows. But if you like, working with wax pencils, you need to find a flow of making most attractive effects with your particular skill set. I noticed that I'm really good at blending colors. So I'm finding ways to use the pencils to my advantage. In this case, using a lighter color on top of a darker one creates a softer blending effect. So play with it. Try out different patterns, different orders. See what works for you, see what creates the most beautiful skin tones, and go with that. But know where the shadows must go. And of course, if you're working gently not applying too much pressure, you can always adjust all of these things along the way. So something's not light enough, we're not dark enough. All of that can be adjusted. Yeah, I see. This kinda just makes it smoother if I already had it down and I was adding brown right now, so much brown, you would probably see the actual pencil marks of where I'm adding the brown. It would be a little bit more difficult to blend. Remember, our first layers that we apply over the white charcoal are the easiest to blend with acute HIV. As we add more and more pencil layers, pencil layers on top of pencil layers, the Q tip trick doesn't work as effectively. It trails off towards the end. So plan your blending techniques, know your tools. Do this one's following myMethod, following my exact steps. See how it works, get a feel for it, and then try it a little bit differently. Maybe you'll discover something new, something that works better for you. I do want to leave some areas very light because I find the shine on her face to be very attractive. But not pure white. Just very, very light. On something like this makes sure that the tip of the nose is the lightest part because it's the closest one to the camera. The channel will be the second lightest. Not counting the actual reflections on the lips, but on the skin, nose, chin than cheekbones, and then all the details around the eyes. That's the order of lateness. Going to apply the same color to the lips? Just a little bit, not a lot. I hope you remember from part one the rule of introducing new colors. The general rule is as soon as you introduce a new color, added all over, not just two parts of the face. You don't want it to come out looking patchy. Everything has to balance. It's easy to neglect the neck because it's kinda boring compared to the really interesting vase with all these features. But don't, don't neglect the neck. It's important that the whole thing works together. If you don't have the shadows and the color is established on the neck, the face will look like it's just floating in space. See how this color brought the shadows together. Now it looks like we're using the colors, the tone of the paper to create this three-dimensional shape that's kind of coming out of the paper. It's quite an attractive look. It's still not a realistic skin tone, but at least it looks like we're starting to sculpt it. So go ahead and pick a nice soft mustard color and apply this as a blender layer. And we'll continue shaping this face together when you're ready. 16. Going darker (olive skin): Okay, I hope you're ready to continue. Let's add some darker brown. So it's not that I'm necessarily going from darker to lighter on this one. The opposite of the first part. But I'm switching it up. Going dark. I'm balancing it out with late, adding some more dark. We're going to balance it out with a nice pink. So it's, it's a balanced game on this one. A little bit of darkness, a little bit of blending, a little bit more definition with a darker color, a little bit more blending. We're sculpting this face essentially. So here I picked a really dark brown. I believe we used it on the previous portrait. This is called mud from the dark skin tone set. With this really, really, really, really dark brown. We're going to go over the, obviously there are details like the eyebrows and eyelashes and eyes and these corners of the mouth that will make the face look a lot more three-dimensional. So here we're not really shading, we're drawing in the details. Feel free to add this color to the hair as well. Ultimately, the hair will be so dark brown, it will appear almost black. And I'm adding this color to the strong shadows on the side of the face as well. Really enhance her cheekbones at this stage. And I also want a lot of this color around the eyes. With this model, I imagined that she's not wearing makeup at all. This is just the natural pigment of her skin and the natural shadow placement. You can make her freckles little bit darker at this point if you wish. Only going to enhance a few of them, not all of them because I find that variation in the freckles very attractive. Remember to keep balancing your left side and your right side of the face, but don't obsess over perfect symmetry. In fact, you want to avoid it for more realism. You want the light to be naturally balanced. But the face itself cannot be. Human faces are not perfectly symmetrical. So you see how it's noticeably quite a bit more work than I was on the light skin tone and a light skin tone with it, the the white charcoal background and we added a nice soft color and then the shadows were, they weren't so many of them and they won't so dark. Here, we have to take really good care to make sure that the gradients is smooth and that everything fits together nicely and believably to create an illusion of this three-dimensional phase. But there's so much more pigment that we need to add here. So I cannot stress this enough. Don't rush. Take your time. Consider scale. If you're not comfortable, or you just don't have the time or the patients to color or draw something this size, make it smaller. Even if you're working with my coloring page, printed at 80% or 60% of the size and work on a smaller scale and we'll go a lot faster. Just some fun things you can play around with. There's very important shadow under the chin. I want to make this part right here. The darkest. Be careful with these lines on the side of the face. I see this a lot in drawing and coloring where people follow the this, this part of the cheek or it's sunken in depending on if you're smiling or not, but that whole part, they just make it into these straight lines. Sometimes, sometimes that works if it's more of an art deco style of drawing than that, absolutely works. But if you entire portrait is done realistically and then you have these sidebar and looking things on the side of the face. That's not a flattering look. Try to avoid it. And here's how you see that it kinda started happening to me already. And I'm correcting it because it's a little bit too harsh. Yes. I want a stronger shadow here, but I don't want it to be a line that comes in on the side of her face. So I'm adding a lot more pigment here to diffuse that line that I accidentally created. So this is what I talk about when I'm talking about correcting your work as you're creating it. Everything can be adjusted on the spot. And of course the adjustments can be made only if you don't apply too much pressure. If you made something too dark and you can't lighten it with other colors or with an eraser, then the way to correct it as to make everything else just historic. So I made this very dark shadow on the side here. I like it, but now I have to balance it with the one on the other side being just as dark. Otherwise it's going to look very strange. Of course, can always rely on your trusty Q-tip to save the day. Smooth out any kind of an overkill decision you might have made. And now let's work a little bit on the lips and we'll be done with this color in no time. Of course, the absolute darkest part of the mouth is the inside part where there's no light at all in over here on the corners. Be very careful in this area right here so that she doesn't end up looking like she has a mustache. And I want to make sure that this lower shadow on the bottom lip is really dark. The darker the shadow and the wider the fuller her lips will look. Remember, no corners. We call it the corners of the mouth, but we really don't want them to be sharp points. Okay, this looks really nice. Go ahead and add your super dark brown. And we'll continue making this face look more human. As soon as you're ready. 17. Breath of life (olive skin): For my next color, I'm going with this beautiful coral pink called. Sure, but this is from the light skin tones it. So what's going on here? Beautifully shaded, very three-dimensional, very balanced, very not human. There is no life in his face. This is the color of the paper. This is a sepia colored face. We have a little bit of the mustard yellow glow on it, but not enough over human skin tones. So we have to add a little bit of pink. Now, I'm not a fan of adding straight up pink to any kind of skin tone. So I tend to go for more coral type of a color. This sharp it is perfect. And once again, I'm going to add it over. Not in a single sheet, but as always, building up my three-dimensional shape, building up my layers, and covering all the areas that will lift weight. This is kind of a blush color and required less of the skin tone. You will have a little bit of this blush present. Remember that humans skin is highly reflective. So whatever happens to be around her in the room will also be reflected in her skin tone. Since we already established that this is sunlight or some kind of a warm natural light reflected off something. Perhaps a room filled with natural light with very warm colored walls that are highly reflective. All of that nice sunlight bouncing around, bouncing around the space and reflecting off of her skin will create a lot of yellow and pink tones. If you don't have in your set fancy coral colors, if you only have a straight-up pink, that's fine because we're balancing it with a nice mustard yellow that we already have an undertone. So when I say that, I don't like pure pink, That's just a personal preference. I think it's a little bit too flat for skin tone. But remember you can create any color combining your pencils. So if you have to add an extra layer of something that's a little bit more on the yellow side, then by all means do that. Looking better, right? It's not a drawing anymore. It's starting to look more like a painting. In reality as well. The way that our eyes perceive color, the way that we perceive human's skin as a natural skin tone isn't by identifying a single color and then seeing that it has shadows that are just a darker shade of that color, That's not how it works. Next time you are actually physically sitting across from someone. Pay attention to their face. Pay attention at all the colors that you'll be able to see as they move, as they turn their head, as the lighting changes. It's going to be a little creepy. Maybe you should explain yourself, but do pay attention to that. Notice the blues that you will see in the shadows, the purples, you'll see green, you'll see all sorts of amazing colors. Pink, yellow, skin tones are so rich with reflections and shadows and all sorts of pigments. It's amazing. Definitely time for fast shading on this one. This is not detailed work anymore. This is just adding this screen of this color over everything. If you haven't been grinding your pigment in, you should have no problems at this stage. Again, just freely coloring over the hair, doesn't matter. It's going to be so dark. All of these colors that I'm just layering over, it will be hidden. I want my widest parts of this portrait, ultimately to be the teeth, the white reflections on the lips, and the white reflections in the eyes. I don't want any pure white on the skin. Very pale, pink or mustard. But not why? Because we want her skin to be saddened and reflective but not shiny. Shiny, shiny what she needs to powder her nose. A question came up the other day that I thought was very interesting, very relevant about holding the pencil far back. What happens when your pencils are so loved? This short. To begin with, you can hold it any further back than here. In that case, I would recommend actually using pencil extenders. Don't suffer with short pencils unless you're working on tiny detail. I would, I would find the pencil extender so that you are able to hold the pencil far back. Now, we can add this color quite generously to the lips. This is the part of the portrait where we can store it. Differentiating the lips, their texture and their colour from the rest of the face. So if you want to go more pink on the lips at this point, now's the time. Don't neglect the neck. Remember the whole thing has to look good. Go ahead and do that. Find a nice peachy coral pink added all over. See the difference that it makes. But it's not quite enough. When you're ready. I'll show you more. 18. Go crazy (olive skin): This is a little bit scary, but we're going to add chartreuse, actual bright yellow chartreuse. Why are we doing this crazy step? Well, very simple. Sunlight. Remember we talked about that. The actual lighting and imagining where it's coming from, sunlight is quite yellow. And so far we've established a lot of beautiful brown and pink tones, but it's not quite on the yellow side. So I like to take the brightest yellow that I can find and apply a really soft glaze over it, all over, over everything. Now this is super-fast shading, super, super, super, super fast and barely touching the surface. It cannot stress this enough. And look at the difference that that makes. Now I will scan went from being kind of pinkish, all of a sudden to being this beautiful olive shade. Pretty neat, right? We don't need to add it to the lips. Just the skin. Pay attention to what the chartreuse is doing to the colors that we've already established. If we started with this color, it wouldn't have done anything. It's very important to know when to introduce these crazy colors. We had our shadows established. We had a nice skin tone, tone going, but it wasn't enough. This is a glaze. Very gentle, barely there. And a little bit scary. This far, it was so quick. Let's just continue with the next color without breaking this up into a different section. I feel like we need more brown variation. So I'm introducing this new color that's a little bit reddish. See how many we've already had. You want a lot of colors and complicated skin tones. This is like a burgundy brown. This is called brown bug, and this is from the scorpion said, I felt that I needed in the areas around the eyes and the lips. It's a stronger brown than what we've been using so far. And it has a hint of rust to it, which I think is very attractive. You can add it to the actual eye color as well. That might look really good. Yeah, this was a good choice. And of course, the freckles. Keep in mind that all of these decisions are made on the spot. This isn't a formula that I have written down somewhere and follow for every single portrait. It's different. Every single time. There's a fly in here or something. If you get 100 artists in the room and tell them to paint this portrait from this reference photo, you will have 100 different ways of getting there. Neither one is right. So follow my method, follow my steps. But then DV, when you work with other portraits, when you work with other line work, try different approaches. Just try to remember the lessons. Tried to remember why we're making the choices that we're making. Don't just make a list of colors and try to apply them to every single face. It won't work. But do make a note if you if you aren't going to make notes, instead of making notes on the specific order of the pencils that I use to make note on the pencils that you find to be enjoyable. We all have that one, one-inch benzyl in our, in our pencil said that's the one that we use all the time. That's so loved, it's almost gone. I'm sure you have that. Make a note of it. Find the color that you go to, that's your, that's your ultimate favorite pencil. And make a note of that. Those are much more interesting notes, for instance, I noticed that I use this brown bug quite a lot, especially for skin tones. Now I opened a brand new sets for the purposes of this lesson. But in the sense that I actually use when I draw and color, brown bug is quite short. And yours will be different. Make note of that. Make notes of everything. I feel like down here on the bottom lip, I didn't diffuse the shadow quite enough. That outline is still very sharp. So I'm going to correct it now. And that looks great. Remember to take your shadow in both directions, both to the skin, to the lip. No matter which color you're working with. Again, I don't think she's wearing lipstick, any kind of makeup at all. I'm going for all natural colors on this model. My favorite shadow under the chin. Always the darkest. And let's see if we need any Q-tip work on this one. And actually, despite what I said in the beginning of the lesson, everything is still blending quite beautifully. Even after all these layers of pigment that we've established. These are quite extraordinary pencils I really like black widows. Not all brands will behave this way. Do keep that in mind. I think that was the coolest step yet. I think this particular shade of brown really brought everything together. And there's always that one moment in your drawing and then you're painting where things just click. That was it. So go ahead and find your perfect brown and see what kind of magic you can do to your portrait. And when you're ready, well, it just some shades. 19. Shades (olive skin): I write final step. Let's add some black. Remember that I always leave black for last because I'm not actually using it as a color, but rather as a shade adjustment. Here, our shades are going on pretty far and we're going close to 100% in the nineties. Nearly black, not like in the pale skin tones, but it's still shading, not using straight black. So I'll start with the most obvious parts, the eyebrows and eyelashes. And then we'll see what we can do to the rest of the face. And of course, I still have the hair to do. You might have done the hair already. You can do it at any point. I just didn't want to get distracted from what we're actually learning. The black that I'm using is midnight from the dark skin tone set. But it really doesn't matter. Any black that you're comfortable with. So even though some of these elements will look almost completely black, like the eyebrows right now and the hair will later. It's still not solid black that I always picks up on the difference. This is Richard, this has definition that says undertone, that brown undertone is very important. Solid black, just flat black doesn't look good, doesn't look natural. No matter how dark it make it have that undertone. And of course, with so many layers of bags on our page right now, there's absolutely no sign of paper texture anymore. This is really smooth. This is more like a pastel painting or an acrylic painting. To the shadows on the skin as well. But very lightly. We don't want the skin to look like it has plaque bruises on it. We want to take the brown parts that we've established and make those brown parts a little bit more dark. That's it. A little bit on the freckles. Remember, vary the freckles. Some will be darker so it will be later. And of course, the eyes, the eye lashes will be pure black here, or as close to pure black as possible. Still with that undertone. And this crease in the eyelid. We want to exaggerate as well. Here's a fun fact for portrait drawing and painting. The only part of the portrait that can ever be solid black is the pupil. And the only part that can ever be solid white is this white light reflection. And I, the rest, nearly black, nearly white, but not pure. The only two pure black and pure white elements. The pupil and the reflection. We want to go as dark as possible on the nostrils. But you don't want them to be perfect circles create a gradient from really, really dark in the far side, the deepest part of the nostril and trail it off where you have more light. Same here. We'll have really dark pigment inside the mouth where there's no light at all. And we'll have these really dark corners, corners, not corners of the lips. But again, with nice soft gradient transition. And of course, I want this shadow to be darker. One of my favorite shadows, the one under the lip. And this L most important shadow under the chin. That makes the face really stand out. And of course the hair. I won't bore you with having to watch me color this entire heap of here. But I will complete it. And show you the final result. And you can judge how dramatic you want the shadows to be. They can be a little bit better defined. They can be a little bit more subdued entirely up to you and you'll lighting decision. Consistency is more important than actual saturation. Remember how many colors we went through to get to this point? And this isn't even nearly the full spectrum of what I sometimes use on my portraits. And look at the order. We went from a middle too dark brown to a nice mustard color to a super dark brown to a coral pink show trues, and then burgundy and finally black. You probably wouldn't think of using all of these colors to create this skin tone effect. So what that shows is that skin is highly diverse in all the colors that it can reflect. And there's no limit, there's absolutely no limit to what colors you can use on any given skin tone. The idea is to have enough color variation so that the skin looks realistic. Have enough contrast so that the lighting looks realistic for you to pick and choose exactly which skin tone in which lighting you're actually depicting. So I hope you have fun with this character. Go ahead and give it a shot, finish it up with black. Send me pictures. I can't wait to see what you've done. And when you're ready with this model and ready to move on, we'll move on to really dark skin tones. And I have some surprises of my sleeve for that one. So have fun, and I'll see you in the next section. 20. What to highlight (dark skin): Hello and welcome back to let swatch leases hair grow several inches over the course of a few minutes. As you can tell, these courses take quite a bit of time to record introduce. Since you are here, you are already way ahead of the rest of the class. I think you didn't notice. But statistically, most students don't get further than 20% into the course even if they paid for it. So the very fact that you made it all the way here is incredible. I'm really proud of you. And I guess this means that you are having fun and our learning. So let's move on and color some dark skin tones together. If you've been following these lessons in order, we already completed our light skin tone, our olive skin tone. Now going to do the really dark skin tone. Let's get started. Believe it or not, we're still going to store it with our white charcoal. As you can tell, my white charcoal, good, very loved over the course of these lessons, it is quite short. And when that happens, I like to use my pencil extenders so that I can keep using my tools. So here we will not cover the whole face with white charcoal because the scan will ultimately be very, very dark. So we can actually use the color of this paper to our advantage. But there will be some glare on the skin, some very nice and natural shine on the skin, on the lips. And of course the teeth will be very white. So I will add my white charcoal only to the areas that I'm anticipating to be nearly weight or weight at the very end. The pencil extender is actually a really great idea for white charcoal, regardless of how long your white charcoal is. Because naturally, naturally from the factory, they come in about this length. And you can't, you don't really have the advantage of holding it further back for different kinds of shading that we've already learned. So they extend your, allows you to turn this essentially into a pencil. And of course, I'm working from my reference image. I have my digital painting nearby. I'm actually looking at it. And I'm placing these white highlights where I have the white highlights in the final version of the painting. And you have all those images as PDF downloads as well. And of course, you can also tell where the lightest areas are because I left them completely uncolored and unshaded on the gray scale coloring page. So you can clearly see where the latest areas or that's a very safe way to know where to place these white highlights. Remember, don't grind it in. Rather work these little circular motions to just apply more and more pigment, but you don't need to press on a page a lot. This particular skin tone will have a lot of layers in the end. So be prepared for that. Remember everything that I taught you so far about shading and about applying pressure to the page. This was all leading up to this amazing, beautiful skin tone because it is our most complicated skin tone so far. One that will take the most care, the most planning and the most shading. Adding too much white charcoal is not a problem. If you cover the areas that will ultimately not be this light. Don't worry about it, Don't even bother erasing it. We can just color over them. However, not adding enough white charcoal at this stage is dangerous because you won't be able to add it afterwards. So make sure that you get all the highlights in place. Don't rush. Take your time. As always, don't think like the neck. The neck is very important because the face by itself without the neck just looks like a mask floating in space. We don't want that. Alright, that looks good. Let's smooth it out a little bit without Q2. White charcoal also comes in actual pencil form. It's the same exact stuff just in a pencil form. So if you need to touch up any of the tiny details, for instance, if you want to get really detailed on the teeth and get really clean out lines, switching to a pencil is a good idea. And also these little details on the lips. I tend not to work with the pencil for the general shading because it's a little bit scratchy. For the stick form, it's softer, more powdery. Then the pencil, the pencil has to be condensed, a little bit more condensed than, than the stakes so that it sharpens well. But the material is the same. Also, it takes a lot longer to create all of the shading with a pencil than it does with the steak. But for tiny touch ups, take the low glare spots here and there. I do like to switch to a pencil. These are just personal preference tricks that you'll develop along the way. Some of you will only work with pencils, some will only work with sticks. Some of you may not have been pick up the white charcoal habit and just go with a white pencil and that's perfectly fine. Alright, that looks good. That was really fast and really simple. You're probably already a pro with white charcoal. So go ahead and add these white highlights and when you're ready, we'll continue with the color that you're probably not expecting. 21. Unexpected color (dark skin): Okay, ready for a really strange color? Get out of scrap paper. And the color purple, lilac. Purple, something very soft, very gentle. I like this color a lot. I have a lot of these purple colors in the Black Widow sets. This one is called Purple Haze. The other one that I really love is called tulip to beautiful color. It's very similar to this one, but a little bit, a little bit brighter, a little bit more flowery. Another colors that I had set aside here is this. But I see now this is called pastel purple. And it's too much on the pink side for what I'm looking for. So I will go with this purple haze. This will be our undertone. This dark brown, chocolate brown skin tone is so gorgeous, but it's so easy to make it look too dark and too overwhelming and too flat. I like to give it an undertone that's lilac. And you will see that when we build up the chocolate brown colors on top of this lilac, they will really pop. So now I'm going to color everything that's the color of my paper. Everything except for the white highlights in this beautiful lilac color. Remember your different shading techniques here will be switching from my fast shading to my precision shading, to my detail shading depending on where I am on the face, on the areas that have less definition like cheeks and the neck, the forehead. That will be fast shading. And of course we will practice fast shading by holding the pencil for the back. And then the areas that have a lot more detail like the lips, no brown eyes, the ear. All of that will be more detailed work. And for that, we will be holding up pencil a lot closer to the tip. I know this looks weird. We are coloring a purple face and ultimately this will end up looking realistic. It's quite unusual. But this is a technique that I really like for my dark skin tone portraits. So do, do try it out. Don't get intimidated by this very strange color. I encourage you to experiment and also don't be timid with it. This isn't just a very light purple suggestion of an undercoat. This is a proper thick layer of this mid purple tone. And they will serve its purpose. Very, very important. I cannot stress enough how important it is to not apply too much pressure at this point, this layer is the single most important step in this painting. I keep calling them paintings because ultimately that's really what they are. They're just pencil paintings. So do take your time with this. If it takes an hour, that's fine. But takes 2 h, that's fine. If you want to just work on this today and set it aside for a few days. That's fine too. But do not rush this step. It's an investment. Very important to do it right? Notice that after my previous two models, a strategically didn't give this model any hair. Or very little here. I'm just fed up with it. It was fun. It was fine, but we wouldn't coloring here, we were working on faces, so the hair was just really distracting to me. Especially on the second model where they hear took up the entire page. I don't know what I was thinking there. So after that okay. No more hair. Like little hair that she does have. I'm going to color over it as well. I want that beautiful purple undertone, even in the hair, even though ultimately the hair will be black. You probably notice that this model is also different from the other two because her eyes are closed. This is the first model that I drew with her eyes closed. Just for fun, just for us to have a little bit of variation because closed eyelids are also a lot of fun to color. There's so much texture here. The skin is a little bit different and alike. All these little shiny effects that we can have on the lids, the lips as well, and even the gums. Everything. I want everything to have this beautiful purple undertone. I'm going to smooth this out with the Q tip as well. And we'll be done with this layer in just a minute. Well, that was properly weird, right? Go ahead and find a nice middle purple. Allylic is something that looks like this purple haze or the tulip that I mentioned. And apply this base layer. Remember this is the single most important step in this portrait. So take your time. Take care practice the different types of shading that we already learned. When you're ready, only when you're ready. We'll move on to yet. 22. Brown (dark skin): Okay, ready? Let's add some brown. For my next color. I want a really rich chocolate brown. This is what I came up with. This is a color called nigra from the dark skin tone set. And now we can build up the actual skin color, as well as the shadows going over this purple and see what it does. It doesn't look the same way that it did just on blank paper. It's changed. It's a lot more interesting. There's a lot more play, especially in this gradient transition from brown to white. And of course, the application of color itself is physically smoother. Adding that layer of purple served an extra purpose of being a base layer and not just in terms of a base color, but an actual base layer of wax. Now, everything that we apply over it will just glide on the surface of the paper that much smoother. The danger with coloring really dark skin tones is that it often ends up looking like a doodle. A colorist may rush the process and it will come out like an actual scratch chicken scratch doodle with a lot of the sketch marks and it's just not an attractive look. The face looks hairy or scarred, not, not a desirable look at all. So to get that smoothness in your color application, having a base layer of a lighter color that's already smoothed out with UQ tube is a huge help. And of course the pencil sketch marks are more obvious with a darker color. So applying this dark brown just to the naked paper would be very difficult. It's doable, of course, but it's very difficult and it's very dangerous because it may look to sketching. But now we don't have to worry about it. We can sit back and let the pencil just do the work on its own. Again, working from my reference picture. I'm adding brown pretty much everywhere that I already colored in purple. And the brown that you pick is entirely up to you. There's so many there, there are a hundreds and thousands of different browns among all the pencil sets that you may be using. I'm working with black widow pencils, but I always preach that you should work with whatever you're comfortable with. I'm not going to say that this is the best brand on Earth. It is the best brand for me at the moment. You may be going through a different phase. You may prefer different kinds of pencils, but a selection of brown colors is often one of the richest ones in the professional coloring sets. Prismacolor pencils have an amazing arrangement of Brown's virus have some delicious browns. Of course, black widows. Don't be afraid of going dark. The reason we started with a light-skinned tones and moved on to olives. And only now are working with really dark is to build up that confidence, that competence that is often lacking in colorist. Just adding a little bit of a dark shadow here and a little bit of a dark shadow there isn't enough. These aren't shadows anymore. This is the actual skin pigment applied generously but applied gently. The biggest fear and going dark, of course, is losing definition. You want the features to still be readable, which is why we added all those white highlights to begin with. The shape is now very well established. We have high contrast. Don't worry about losing the details. They will still be there. And of course by now you probably suspect that our final color will be black. So with that black will clean up all of the details and bring out any of the tiny little nuances that you may wish to bring the viewer's attention to. Look how gorgeous that brown looks. Just the touch of purple underneath it. It's magic. Notice all the gradient variation that I'm creating here. I'm not just flatly covering the whole thing was brown. I'm playing with the amount of purple that I have. The dark pools of brown that I can create. For instance, I want this area to be darker, but I want a nice smooth gradient transition here on the forehead, leading into the shiny parts. When working on the eyelids, I like to follow the actual curve lines with my pencil. I don't cheat across only to smooth out the shading and part. But generally I want to exaggerate these lines, these folds that happen on our eyelids when the eyes are closed. Again, this area right here that's up against the little highlights, it will be much darker than the other gradients. Really want to bring that out. And of course, we'll cover the hair. Even though it will be black in the end, we need to build up all the same undertones. That which doesn't look like she's wearing a hat. Treat the whole head is a single object. Don't separate it into elements. It's not. Here, eyes, nose, lips. The whole thing is one rounded object that responds to light. That's what you are drawing. 23. Brown continued (dark skin): Not all of the highlights of pure white will only have a few super shiny areas like these guys. But some of these are just a lighter shade of brown. I'm coloring over them. Remember to vary the direction of your brush strokes, your pencil strokes. Don't want this to look sketchy. You want it to be smooth and attractive. Looking like a painting. Same here, under the eyes, any kind of a prominent line on the face? I like to follow the direction of the actual line with my shading around the nose, these smiling lines. And only then after you've established them you can go across to smooth out that cheating. Now this cheek, this is crucial. This is extremely important. Crucial is even more important than extremely important. I cannot stress enough how important this cheek is. This is the part that scares a lot of colorist and artists and painters. And no matter how professional you are, this is a very intimidating part of the portrait because it's a big wide open area. And we tend not to color very wide open areas with dark colors. When we do portraits, it's a natural habit to add shadows around the areas in the safe spots around the news, around the ears, under the chin. But we tend to leave the front of the face, the cheeks, or the cheekbones, the chin, lighter, and that's not always the case here. This very dark shadow on the side of the face is extremely important for building our three-dimensional subtract. So do spend some time here. Don't rush the cheek. Keep adding layer after layer after layer. We really want this part to be extremely dark. Just like up in these areas. Very important. It's looking lovely. I really, really liked the way the brown lays over the lilac. We've already done a few lessons on lips. So I want to separate this into an individual lesson. We'll continue working the same way that I would actually approach this. If I was working by myself. I would not do the lip separately. I would just do them as part of this stage. So same pencil. Overall, the purple, applying the pigment to the areas that will ultimately be the darkest. And again, you have my shading and my sketch marks to guide you on where to put the darkest parts. Remember the shadow under the lip, that's very important. And no clean outlines. Here. The skin is so dark and the lips will ultimately be even darker that it's actually quite easy to make the outlines disappear almost completely. With lighter skin tones. The coloring page, it's a little bit more complicated because it's a, it's hard to make those black lines disappear. But here I think we'll be able to do it. And of course, you can always print these pages on a lighter setting so that the lines aren't actually black or gray, but are a lighter, much lighter shade of grey. Be careful on this part inside the mouth. We don't want to accidentally color over the teeth. So I'm slowing down and I'm going back to detail work. Just to make sure that everything is nice and clean and tidy. Remember, I like to follow the lines on the lips to give them some texture. I love coloring lips. It's one of my favorite things. A little bit on the gums and a little bit on these teeth that are trailing off into the depth of the mouth. We want a little bit of shadow here. You never want your teeth to be pure way. That always looks a little bit weird. Even if by some freaky occurrence of nature, she has perfectly white teeth, which rarely happens. Even if they're pure weight. They will be partially in shadow because they're inside her mouth. Never pure white on the teeth. It's impossible. Remember the corners of the mouth aren't really corners. We want to create a nice little diffused shadow. I'm saying the word nice a lot today. A nice little something. I think it's my inner Bob Ross coming out. Happy little corners of the mouth and happy little shadow under the lip. I love Bob Ross. I grew up watching his shows. Dreaming that one day I will have my own show and have people watching on their TV screens copying what I'm drawing. Wait a second. That's exactly what's happening. Bob Ross would be proud. Remember this whole side of the face needs to be very dark. Don't skip this part. This is very, very important. Take the time to build up those layers. And it's good practice to, when you get stuck on a portrait like this and that's stuck on, but when you're spending a certain amount of time on a, on a portrait that is going to be several hours, several days. Don't focus on the final results. It's not about rushing to the finish line. It's not about completing it. Enjoy the process. Really lose yourself in the process because every project that you work on is an opportunity to practice and perfect your tools and your techniques. And every time you get a little bit faster, little bit smoother, little bit more precise. None of this goes to waste, even if you don't succeed the first time, if you make a portion that you don't really like, or if a certain effect doesn't come out exactly the way that you wanted to. It's not wasted time. You've learned something, your hand picked up a new habit, you, the tiny muscles in your hand and now a little bit more in tune with what's in your head. None of it is wasted, so please don't get discouraged if something doesn't work out right away. The very act of coloring is learning, improving. You may not see that you are improving, but you are. And on that note, we are not very good at seeing our own progress and seeing our own successes. I call this the artists curse. We are unable to see and properly judge our own creations. So it's very important to share your work with other people. Almost forgot the hair. That took awhile. A little bit of the Q-tip blending. And we'll be done with this layer. Go ahead and give this a shot, spend some quality time with your brown pencil. Remember these aren't shadows. This is the actual skin pigment. Invest their time into making the proper smooth gradients. Gradient variation is extremely important on this step. You don't want this face to look flat. There's a lot of definitions, a lot of relief. We have a beautiful model to work with. Spend some time with her a day, two days, as long as it takes. When you're ready. We'll continue together. 24. More purple (dark skin): Character place any bets on what the next color will be. My trusty paper. And the next color, we need a drum roll. More purple. I wanted deeper proper royal purple at this point. And now this is shadow work. The color that I picked is called Deep Purple. What do you know from the Black Widow scorpion set? So here with this deep purple, we'll go over everything that will ultimately be black. So the eyebrows, eyelashes, the nostrils, the really, really dark shadows there will be nearly black hair. And of course we'll do some detailed work on islands. Again, the brown and the purple, they're just playing off each other. This purple doesn't come across as clean, dark, deep purple. It comes across as a deeper shade of brown. But somehow more interesting than just flat brown. And I'm adding it to all the areas of the face around the eyelids, all of the all of the relief areas that will have the darkest shadows. Anywhere that you want, a higher contrast and you've been able to establish with the colors so far, add this color. If you added your brown generously and smoothly, this step should go pretty quickly. And it should also look very smooth and natural. And not at all like Deep Purple. Remember the rule of adding a new color? We're adding it everywhere, just in different amounts. So even here on the cheeks doesn't seem like it's that necessary, but it is. Just add it very lightly because we need that overall balance. We can't have certain parts of her face actually appear to be a different color. But we do want that gradient variation. See what that does for our 3D look. Everything just looks. So real. Contrast is everything. In portrait drawing. Contrast, I would argue, is way more important than color. We could make this face in green, we could make it in blue and yellow and pink and any color imaginable for the skin tone. And it can still look amazing and realistic if the contrast is established correctly. Make sure when adding your purple colors that you're adding them to enhance your Brown's. Not to make the skin look actually purple. Now we can add this dark purple and very generously to the lips. Not pressing, never pressing. But more and more layers of this color. I want her lips to be really shiny. So contrast is essential here. When shading like this. Also be careful with what you have underneath your page. You see that I have these white papers underneath. There's a whole stack of these papers because the cardboard itself under the papers, That's my drawing board, has a very strong texture. So I've actually done portraits with shading techniques like this. With my page placed directly on the cardboard and the entire texture of the cardboard came through in the portrait. It was the charcoal piece and it was just really painfully obvious. I couldn't see it in real life, but on camera, all the texture of the cardboard came through and the face just look spotted in the symmetrical spots. It was awful. I had to redo the whole thing and I learned my lesson that you need to have a nice soft, cushy surface that doesn't have any strong texture to it because it will show through on whatever your coloring. So if you're drawing directly in your notebook and your sketch book, that's ideal because of course you have the whole stack of papers underneath. If you're coloring and you've printed this on a standalone page, make sure to have a nice thick layer of something, somewhat soft underneath, not too soft. You don't want a whole stack of pillows under there, but I have five papers underneath on top of the cardboard. That works for me. I tend to learn the hard way. So I want to spare you guys some of the lessons. And in the life of an artist, just save you some time and tiers. Notice that my Q-tip smearing is getting rougher and rougher and it's taking less and less time. It's because everything's already really smooth. We don't really need the help of a Q-tip. But I like this kind of an airbrushed touch. We only have a few steps left. So go ahead and add your royal purple, and we'll move on together when you're ready. 25. The missing colors (dark skin): Remember that we talked about skin being highly reflected. This is looking great, but it's still little bit monochromatic. But at least it appears a little bit monochromatic. I feel like we need more definition here. So let's add a little bit of a peachy coral color. I'm going to go with this. Orangey pink coral. Even orange itself would be nice. This is called sure, but I think we used it on one of our other portraits already. Severity, nice color. I tend to go to it a lot when I work on portraits, as you can see, regardless of the actual skin color. And this is going to be fast, really fast shading and just low accents here and there. With this sharp it is doing is bringing warmth to the face. We don't really want her to have blush because she wouldn't with the skin tone. But she is picking up a lot of sunlight, that reflective quality of skin that we talked about. I want nice, warm, friendly light on her face. Remember that portraits and more attractive in warm lighting than they are in cool lighting. We've added so much purple here. It's easy to get carried away with purple and have the whole thing look a little bit cold, little bit grayish. Even we don't want this to look cold, we definitely don't want it to look gray. So a touch of a warm tone. Any warm tone, orange, ochre, pink, coral, peach. Just to these transition areas where we go from the purple brown to the white. That will do the trick. Very, very fast shading at this point can add it a little bit to her tongue. That looks good. And a lot to these lighter pools of light on her face. It's even her expression. You'll talk to your characters. Try to imagine a story. Where is she? What is she thinking about? The way that she has her face slightly pointed up and her eyes closed. I imagined she's outside. I imagine she has actual warm sunlight on her face. I want to bring that out with my warm colors. Again, not a lot. We don't want her to have pink spots on her face. That's not the idea. With skin tones. The trick to successfully coloring skin tones is understanding when you're adding a color to the pigment. When you are adding a color to the light effect. And you'll get a hang with, with time. And with practice, you will start picking up on things when you work from photography or if you work with real models, which is ideal. If you can get someone to sit still for you for a few hours. Do it, do it, do it, do it. Grab a friend, grab a family member, make them watch a movie or something so that they actually sit still and draw them in different lighting on different days and see that even though you're drawing the same person, you're using different colors every time. 26. Missing colors continued (dark skin): That's it. Lightning fast. That took, I don't know, 2 min, less than 2 min. Really, really, really fast. And because it was so fast, Let's actually add another color. While we hear. Olive brown. Again, one of my favorite Mustard colors. You know, I love my mustards over the pink, over the way. This is a hint of that sunlight. There is no perfect skin tone pencil. They don't exist. We have to build up all these layers and we have to build up all of these illusions. That's what this course is all about. I hope that throughout all these lessons, you've picked up on all of my messaging of how to build up colors and how important it is to develop your own style and building up these colors and your own intuition. It's not a formula. It's about looking at what you've done so far, assessing it, and seeing if it's missing anything and if it is adding more. That was it. Just a few strokes with this color? I'm going to take a look at this. I'm going to take it all in, see what's missing for me. And what I think is missing here is a touch of something like this. Some kind of a chestnut brown. This is called frosty. Going to add this rusty brown just a little bit to the areas that are in shadow. And this color is serving the same purpose. It's adding warmth. It's the same darkness of brown that we've been using so far, but it's much warmer. Could you have started with this? Absolutely. Maybe you did. Maybe this was the actual brown that you chose for your first brown color. And that's perfectly fine. It's all about balance. But adding this many different colors is essential. Don't try to find that one perfect brown and doing the whole portrait in it and just leaving some parts later and making some other ports darker. That's not skin tone color and that's monochromatic shading. We want a painting like effect. In painting, you mix a lot of colors. This stage of the coloring, this is like this is like playing with filters and effects in your photos. Most of the work is already done. We just want a slight shifts in tents and tones. And of course, every new color you add adds to the smoothness of the whole shading effect. So the more the merrier. Remember what we talked about when we talked about flattening the tooth of the paper. If you do this correctly, if you do this my way, you should not have any problems with adding this many layers of color. The paper is not ruined, It's not flattened. I can keep adding and adding as many colors as I want. So when you do this on your own, that's one of the most valuable lessons that I want you to remember. Not at all about color selection. It's about how you treat your page. It's about how you treat your character. Treat them carefully. You treat them with the respect that they deserve. They will pay you back by looking at these. For my final touch on the missing colors, I'm going to go with a different brand, believe it or not. So it's very hard to see on this paper. This is a pencil called 20 per cent French gray, and this is from the Prismacolor set. This is the only pencil that I still use from the Prismacolor set while working with my black widow pencils. This is my ultimate blender pencil. And you'll have these, you'll develop your personal preferences. There will be very specific. I don't expect you to have this particular pencil. You may. Maybe you don't. It's not necessary. But I wanted to share this with you because this is something that I would do on this portrait if I was working on it by myself. The reason that I like this 20% French gray so much is that I can use it over my established colors. And I can add a little bit of a shine to the face. It's not it's not white. It's a very, very light gray. It's a very soft gray. And it's a very specific chemical reaction that happens between black widows and prisma colors that I find extremely attractive. And this is why it's so important to have a test paper and to practice and to draw something different every day, to color something different every day. And to constantly be trying new pencils, new pencil variations and combinations. Because you'll come across stuff like that. I'm sure there are thousands of different pencil combinations out of there then I'm not even aware of yet, but I will be as I keep working, keep experimenting, trying new things. If something doesn't work at all. So what, who cares? Try it again, try it on a different page. It's not the end of the world if something didn't work out, but you've learned your lesson, you've made your node, you won't do that again. But maybe you'll come across something absolutely amazing, very subtle touch. I really, really like it. Look at the blending that I can get here on the gradient. Can do a lot of low shiny effects here on the lip with this pencil. It's the tiny details that take our work from good to incredible. And I want you to be an incredible colorist. The best tip that I can give you is keep experimenting. Don't just blindly follow somebody else's collared shirts. Learn your own lessons. Make your own notes. Make your own art. Every coloring that you complete is indeed a work of art. Okay, I think that's enough. We definitely don't want to overwork this step. This is an interesting one. This is a step that takes the most personal decision-making. So spend some time with it. Don't overthink it. Trust your gut, trust your intuition. See what's missing. Try adding different colors. Don't go too crazy. This isn't a salad. We don't want to throw everything at it. But three or four new colors to balance things out is just what the Dr. ordered. Go for it, add your colors, and when you're ready, we'll do our final touches with black. 27. Final detail (dark skin): I hope that went well. I hope it wasn't too scary, too intimidating. If you did get intimidated and didn't add a lot of these colors just to play it safe, just to be able to move forward. That's perfectly fine. You will develop that confidence as you keep practicing. But do keep practicing, you will not master skin tones just by following these three colorings with me. This is something that you need to take with you into the rest of your life, into the rest of your career as an illustrator or as a colorist practice every day, not necessarily with a full-page portrait, but with something as long as you're shading, as long as you're working with color, you're practicing. So even if you're working on a small scale, if you're coloring and coloring books, practice, practice, practice. Every day. I know that it's a scary concept to be doing something every day, but honestly that's what it takes. I'd love to tell you that you should draw and color on your own free time when you have time off from walking the dogs are going to the office or going to the gym. But that's not how it works. You need to find the time to practice every day. If you can find 10 min to sit down and practice your shading skills, you will improve really quickly. So find the time, put it in your actual schedule. Reward yourself for doing it, whatever works for you. But practice every day. The dimension practice everyday. Practice everyday. Our final touch, of course, black. Here, we're going to add black to all the areas that will be the darkest. So as we already discussed, that will be the facial features like the eyebrows, eyelashes, the nostrils. But also we will add it for contrast on the lips to make the lips look more shading to the hair and to some of our shadows. As you learned by now with my other portrait work, we don't add black for the sake of the black pigment. We add black to create new shades. I've already established colors. So here we have a beautiful brown gradient. But I want it to be a little bit darker for that high contrast. So I'm very, very gently adding some black to make the contrast stronger. Remember that nothing should have really sharp outlines on the face. Even things like eyebrows, no matter how well she her eyebrows are, even if she goes to the salon and gets them all plugged or whatever people do with their eyebrows and salons. It's not going to appear like a clean outline. I'm doing a lot of gradient shading in this area right here. Very few actual outlines. This is one of the few is the eyelashes because they are actual individual hair follicles. Everything else, all the facial features, they're all diffused. This is one of my favorite areas to work on. These final steps on the eye, on the eyes and eyelids. It's where we bring out all the definition, all these beautiful wrinkles that she has. These folds of the eyelids. Naturally wrinkles. They're really folds. We, we all have them and they're really attractive. And to anyone who is worried about losing definition on a face with a dark skin tone. Look at how much definition we have. In fact, I feel that we have a lot more definition here than we do on a pale skin tone. There's hardly any definition here at all. A lot of the relief around her nose area and her cheekbone areas just lost because there isn't enough pigment to play with. Here, however, we can see everything a lot cleaner, a lot more clearly. I want to add a lot of black to the lips for the high contrast for that shine effect that we talked about. And also to see if I can clean up these outlines a little bit. Or rather diffuse these outlines a little bit because they are quite clean to clean. In fact, we'll try to hide them with this pigment. That looks really nice. A little bit of a darker shadow in the depths of the mouth to make it look more three-dimensional. And of course, this part, nice. I really liked that. We're really hiding those outlines now. Yet her lips don't look black. They have so much colours, so much definition in so much structure there, beautifully rounded and shiny. At this point. Spend a lot of time just stepping back from your drawing, from your coloring and assessing it. See if it still makes sense from a distance. If something looks off with one of her eyes, looks a little weird, or her cheek is just not three-dimensional enough. Go back and correct the areas that need to be corrected. I do this a lot. I actually physically stand up a step away. I assess my drawing, and I go back to the drawing board with my corrections with my adjustments. Because if you have your nose buried in your coloring, you don't see the bigger picture, you just gets stuck on that one tiny detail. And finally, when you're done and only then you step back for the first time. It may look a little lopsided and you're like, Well, I did everything right. I followed all the steps. Don't get stuck in one position. Remember to step back and assess. I think mine is done. I think she looks great. She looks balanced to me. She looks attractive, her face is very realistic, her skin tone is beautiful. I could certainly keep working on this further to make it more photo-realistic. But I think for the purposes of our demonstration, we can call her done. Now. I can't wait to see what you create. So I hope you enjoyed the journey. Go, go practice, make some amazing skin tone colorings. Have fun. Bye.