How to Render Skin in Procreate

1. Introduction: Have you ever struggled with painting skin in a way that does not feel flat or muddy or maybe inexpressive? Whether you are at the beginning of your journey as an artist or a few years into it, I believe the course will be a good refresher for you, a way to brush up on your skills or maybe learn a few new tricks in Procreate. Hi, I'm Lara, an illustrator and graphic designer. I've been teaching on Skillshare for about five years now. At the moment of publishing this class, I have over 6,000 students on Skillshare, and you can find quite a few classes on character design on my profile. I previously taught this particular class about painting skin in a live workshop at East European Caicon where I collaborated with Wacom and taught a handful of people how to paint skin step by step. Now I want to create a version of that workshop that you can watch online in your own time and experiment whenever you want with the techniques I'm about to teach you. As always, my class is structured in a way that's easy to follow. We will first study some references and understand colors. Then go into the demo drawing, learn how to shade, how to add highlights, how to add blush, and then contrast what adjustments we can make appropriate. And finally, I will show you some alternative lighting scenarios and give you your project. There will also be a bonus time laps at the end of my witch hat a till year drawing that I just finished. And of course, if you like my art and would like to follow me, I'm the most active on Instagram as Lara Underscore rtscape. If you like this class, I appreciate any feedback and reviews and if you publish a project, I would love to see your work and give you some feedback. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. Reference study: Okay, so the first thing that I want to do with you guys in this course is to get clear on how we choose colors for the skin. I chose free pictures from Pinterest with different skin tones so we can see what we're looking for on the color wheel. Let's check the first one. When analyzing a picture like this and we're looking to pick up colors, we are mainly looking for free colors, the base color, the shading, and the highlights. The base color of the skin in this picture would be somewhere around here. It's a bit more difficult to pick up due to the lighting in this piece that makes the face look very airbrushing. But let's take a look on the color wheel and see where our color is. In Procreate, I always prefer to use the classic view instead of the disc one, even though I still call it a color wheel. It's easy to see that from left to right, we have the saturation levels. So this saturated is in the left side, saturated on the right, and from top to bottom, we go from right to dark. This classic view also has the HSB sliders below the large square, so we have hue, saturation, and brightness. With skin, you will generally find your colors on this side of the hue slider. So basically around red, orange, yellow, and more often than not, you will find your colors around here. Depends on the intensity of the skin color that you need, but generally it's around here, more towards the desaturated area of the color wheel. So for this reference, I already picked up the main colors in the swatches below the picture. Somewhere around here is the base color. Then you have the highlight, which is usually here or on the forehead or on the nose. Generally, these are the highlighted areas you see here. Then you have the shadows. When you pick them up from a photo, you will see the shadows being very desaturated and sometimes extremely dark. At times even close to black, but in illustration, we don't do that. In illustration, shadows are colorful and we avoid the very dark colors. In illustration, shadows are colorful and we avoid the very dark colors on skin, so we don't end up with a muddy result. You'll see what I mean better when we get to actually do some coloring. These are the three colors I would use for this portrait. Let's go to the next example. Mm. The base color would be somewhere around here. And the highlights around here, the shadows around here. You can see that the light source is around the left side of the picture, so there's a heavily shaded area around the right side. For each reference photo, I also highlighted the area where you can find the colors if you want to achieve a similar color palette to the picture. Now let's move on to the last one. This is the base color for this particular picture, nothing too tricky. Where it gets tricky instead is finding the right shading colors. As mentioned before, we don't want our illustration getting to muddy, so we have to find the color that keeps the intended tone, but that is also more vibrant. The beauty with illustration is that you can use a lot of colors for shading like blue, purple, browns, and so on. So these are our free references with the main color palette and where you can pick up the colors from. This is how you can study references or if you want to freestyle a drawing, this is how you can choose colors. Now let's move on to the next lesson where we will actually start drawing. 3. Shading: Now let's start coloring our model here. We have our model on this layer. We have the lineart, the hair, the eyes, everything on one layer. I already made a new layer and put it beneath the lin art layer because we will color everything underneath it. Before we jump into shading, let's be real quick with setting the base color. I will select my Lasso tool and start following the line art. I will take a short cut around the hair since the hair is on a layer above, so it doesn't matter if I don't stick within the lines here. Now I will close my selection and choose color fill, and I already have a color selected. Let me play around with it a bit until I'm happy with the result. You can go with whichever base color you prefer. The steps are the same, only the colors used for shading and lighting will differ, of course. Now we will make a new layer and set it to multiply. We will also tap on the thumbnail and set this layer to clipping mask, which means that all of our shading will remain in the bounds of the base layer. You can take a large round brush to add your shading. I will use this brush in most of my drawings. It's very easy to use and it can be blended pretty nicely. Now I will start adding my shading over here. Let me set up the light source in the upper left side of our character like this. You should keep in mind where your light source is coming from so you can address the shading accordingly. We will have a shadow under the chin as well. Under the nose, on the lips, under the eyes over here the collar bone and something like this. Now we will take the smudge tool and using the same round brush, we will simply blend in the colors. This is called the soft shading. I always start with the soft shading. It helps having this gradient down before adding any of the hard shadows that we will build later. Of course, the shadows depend on the hairstyle and clothes, but for this example, we will have a shadow over here and here, basically wherever the face is hidden from the light source. As for the heart shading, let me show you with a different color where it should go. I will mark a few places on the face so you have an idea where you will have to do the heart shading. Oh. So these are the main areas where we will be adding the heard shading and they will contrast with the soft shading we have done so far. We will keep them on a separate layer. I will also be using a lot of lasso tool to create the hard shading or sell shading, as you may have heard about them before. I will also deactivate the color filling option because I don't like it when I'm doing the shading. I like to create a selection and be able to control the pressure of the brush. Basically, I'm trying to create a shadow gradient within each selection with one part being darker and one part of the selection being lighter. In Photoshop, you can achieve a similar result by selecting the area and using the gradient tool. Now, let's follow the shape of the hair and create a shadow shape beneath it. I will use a bigger brush size here. Now, under the ice, I will just continue doing the shading as you have seen before. I tend to leave the lips less obvious, so I will erase a part of this. Now, let's go on the right side under the chin. We can also add another multiply layer for some extra shading on this side of the face. It's optional. It's up to you. It depends what kind of mood and live scenario you want to go for. You can see that this layer of shadow is lighter than our previous one, and I also made it on a separate layer so I can remove it if I'm not sure whether I want to keep it or not. For now, let's group the shadow layers. Oh, yes, Procreate changed where you can group them from. You will now have to select your layers by quickly dragging them to the right. Then you will see this small blue arrow here on the top, tap on it, and then group layers. Let's rename this, and then we will continue with adding the highlights in the next lesson. 4. Lighting: Okay, so now we are back on the lighting lesson. Let me just arrange my layers a bit before we get started. I will duplicate the shading group. And then let me just press the thumbnail and flatten it. So that's how I did it to get this flat layer. Then I'm making a new layer above it, set it to color dodge, and I just grouped these two layers for our lighting group. Okay, so let's get started. So now I'm creating a new layer above the base and the shadow, and I will set it to color Dutch. Now, for color dodge to work nicely, especially on a lighter base like this skin tone, it's important to choose a dark color with the tint that you want your light to be in. So for instance, I want my light to be pinkish, so I will go for a really dark red. How dark is something that I only know after testing a few different nonces. You can definitely give it a try and test different hues depending on what light you are aiming for. You can also go more towards orange if you want to make it feel like your character is bidding in sunlight. Now for the placement of the highlights because a lot of people ask where to place them exactly. In order to best understand where to place the highlights, we will return to our light source, and I will try to demonstrate in an easy manner where to look for the highlights and why. Just give me a second here. I'm not preaching to draw portraits only using planes because I'm not drawing like that either, but it is still important to understand that some surfaces are more likely to be highlighted because their plane is slightly upwards. So the light hits basically these surfaces and then they create a shadow beneath. So here's a very simple graphic example. If we had planes like this, maybe like, I don't know, like some stairs, which side would you assume is the light and which one is the dark? I'm sure you guessed right, so all you need to do now is to think the same about the face without sweating the details of the faces planes if you do not want to go into so much detail. If you do, however, want to learn more about this, my class on character design portraits explains them in more detail. So going back to our character, we will find those areas over here, and here, let me circle them one by one. Normally, you would get a light above the lips, but I tend not to add that because my style is not realistic or semi realistic. So I feel like it's place is not in my art, but you can add it if it's suitable to your style. We will now take the smudge tool and blend everything in. Try to toggle the visibility of this layer on and off so you don't smudge it too much that you can't see it anymore. A word of advice, better smudge these soft shades or lights rather than use an airbrush. The airbrush, and let me just look for it and procreate, gives your artwork the infamous airbrush look, and you really want to avoid that. Our goal is to create a base with a gradient for shadows and lights and then reinforce everything with hard shadows or lights. Contrasting these two types of shading will give your art a lot more depth. So let's continue now blending the lights. I will erase a bit of them here because it's still bright. You can also try to adjust your base color if you can't find an appropriate lightnons. You can do that in curves or in the hue saturation brightness livers. Now let's make a new layer and set it to add, which is a lot lighter than colored Dodge. I usually use my own Lin art brush for this layer mode, and I use it to add the rim light, but also some extra lights here and there. Let me show you. Another thing you can do is create a new layer on color touch and select some shapes with the lasso tool and use a large round brush to create some light shapes, again, to break up the smooth surface. With male characters, you will use them a lot more often, but female faces are more blended, if you will. So let's just at some more over here. It so this is the lighting scenario that we have right here. We will study a few more in one of the next lessons. The last thing we can do now is make a new color touch layer and grab the inartTol, which by the way, you can find in the resources section below. Now we can simply highlight the border between light and dark, but it doesn't always work well, depending on your artwork. It works in a very contrasty setting like the golden hour or similar environments. I will remove it for now, but I wanted to show you the possibility of doing that. Now we will add some contrast and blush in the next lesson. I will see you there. 5. Contrast and makeup: Now that we have our highlights and shading, let's group our layers and flatten what we have so far. We want everything to be on one layer so that we can move on with the contrast and the blush. First of all, we want to do a blush for this character. I usually do this for female characters. I feel like it adds a depth to the whole portrait. So I will choose a desaturated pink and make two blobs below the eyes and simply smudge them across the face as if it's a mask that's going below the eyes. I wanted to go over the nose as well, keeping in mind the curvature of the nose. This is totally optional, of course, you can just kip this step if you don't want to do that. But in case you want to do it, I wanted to include it in this lesson. M Now that the blush is done, let's move on to the essential part of this lesson, which is contrast. Whenever you feel like there's nothing left to add to a piece or if you feel like something is missing, but you're not sure what, try adding contrast. In simple terms, darken your darks and brighten your lights. How I do this is by creating a new layer set on multiply, and I usually use my online art brush and just get a desaturated color and reinforce it and reinforce some of the shadows. I will not cover a shadow shape entirely. I prefer to leave the different layers of shading visible, which basically adds depth and free D effect to your drawing. Replacing all of the previous shadows with a darker will only will give contrast, but it will look flat. Let's do it like this. I will show you what my process is for this part. By the way, if you want my Line art brush, either for shading or for line art, don't forget to download it in the resources section. You will also get the step by step guide of the course and the practice sheet for you to exercise with. Now, for some nice highlights, you can create a new layer set on AD or Color Dodge and add a few small highlights like on the lips, nose, and under the eye. You can also use a speckle brush and make a glitter effect like this. Or you can use a similar brush to add freckles using a multiply layer. I will select the area I want my freckles in and just tap a few times to add these details. Oh, and it looks pretty cute, actually. You can also use an overlay layer to brighten or non specific parts like the lips. Let me show you. In a similar manner, you can draw makeup for your character. Let me try adding some red eyeliner. Or let's try a purple eyeshadow. This one will be set on multiply. I will create a different layer for it. Our character is starting to feel ready to party anytime now. Okay, so for now, I will remove the eyeshadow, but keep the non lips. I will now prepare my layers for the final adjustment, which we will do in the next lesson. Mm 6. Adjustments: We are almost done now guys. We have this layer with everything we have done so far. These two are our duplicates. We will need two duplicates of the original to create gradient maps. Gradient maps are an interesting way of adding a mood to an illustration or to make the whole thing look a lot more cohesive. So these are all the options that you have. You will learn what you are looking for when you start using them. But let's say I will go with this one. Once I select it, it changes the whole layer into those colors. So that's why I need a duplicate of the whole thing. But you won't leave it as it is, you will change the layer mode and feel free to test which one looks best. And then you will also adjust the opacity. I sometimes go with a multiply, sometimes with lighter color, sometimes with overlay. Once I feel like it enhances my drawing, I play around with the opacity of the layer until I get the desired feel. Then I merge it with the layer below, which is the second duplicate. Now let's see before and after by toggling the visibility of this new layer. I sometimes get surprising results by using this gradient map now, for instance, I feel like this simple adjustment changed the mood of our drawing so much in what? 1 minute. What you can do next is to play around with curves. I sometimes do this and sometimes I don't. There's no scientific way for me to explain curves to you, but you can play around with them on various channels and see how they influence your work. The channels are the ones on the right. Sometimes I end up moving curves just a bit in the Gamma channel, and sometimes I end up moving them on three different channels. This example here looks like it gives a night setting. This can work depending on the background. Let me show you my recent illustration from which had a tilier. Once I have the character in the background, I play around a lot with curves and color balance or gradients. I always duplicate my layers to be able to see if I like the changes or not. To show you a quick glimpse of this illustration, it goes from this to this, and then you see a background changing so much, and that's where you can start using these adjustments to tie everything together, and the character will not look like it's copy pasted on a random background. So back to our drawing, let me show you how color balance works. You can basically adjust the highlights, the mid tones, or the shadows and you adjust to lean more into red or CN, magenta, green, yellow or blue. To be honest, I very rarely use color balance. I'd rather use curves and gradient maps, but this is, in essence, how you are using it. Another adjustment you can make is adding chromatic aberration. I usually use this option with the pencil tool, not on the whole drawing, and then I add it from place to place. I don't want to overwhelm the illustration with this, and for a portrait, it could be a bit too much. You can use this on a bigger illustration. Let's say you have the whole hair done, the clothes, everything. The next thing you can do is add half tone. You can do the same with half tone and use the pencil option, again, not the whole canvas. I sometimes do this to add a bit of extra texture in the shadow. So don't do it for every shadow part, just a few places where you want to add some texture and something else for the eyes of the viewer to look at. You can also use bloom in a similar manner and you will add extra light. I want to try to add it here. I feel like it's easier, however, to control a layer with add or color Dutch instead of using bloom, but you can test it out and see how it feels for you. You can also add a grainy texture by adding noise. I add this on the whole illustration this time. This is what it looks like at 2% noise, and this is 5%. If we go over 10%, it's starting to look a bit too retro. But if that's what you are going for, then that's great for you. You can test it out and see how it feels like when you are zooming in and out. That's about it in this lesson. In the next one, we will talk about different lighting scenarios and what your project is for this class. 7. Project and lighting scenarios: So now I want to show you some different lighting scenario that you can practice on your own time. Right here, we have a scenario where the light source is basically right on the left, so not upper left, it's right on the left side of the drawing. And you can see how let me try to create a new layer. You can see how harsh the light is on this side of the face and how it's following the curvature of the face. You can see here. You will also have the Rembrandt triangle over here and you will have multiple instances of this light present in the hair as well. We did not concentrate on the hair in this tutorial, but I have some others, older classes on how I draw hair and how I color hair. But I will create an updated version of that pretty soon because I learned a lot since I last done that class and I want to update you on that. Going back here, we also have a dramatic light over here, you see. Basically, the most of this lighting scenario is given by the shadows. You can see the harsh shadows create the impression that the light source is very, very close to the face. And the farther the light source goes, basically the smoother the transition of shades will be. So moving on, we have this option. This is a lot more on the upper side than what we have done. We have done something that's some around here. But in this scenario, we have it upwards. We have the hair very lit up, but the shadows are very powerful over here. And we also have very strong shadows here and under the chin. The last one is with the light source on the right. Now we have all the shadow here, again, following the curvature of the face. We have shadows here that are forming around the hair. We have shadows in the hair and here as well. And over here. This will be in the handouts that you will get in the resources section. You can try to do this on your own time. You can test it with a practice sheet that you will also get in the resources section and you can simply test out these lighting scenarios are the one that we have drawn until now and you can post it as a project. This will be my project for you guys. Just create any of the lighting scenarios. You can use the model over here or you can use your own character, just start creating and publish it in the project section and I will give you feedback as soon as I see it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for watching my class. I will leave you with a bonus with the drawing time labs of Cocoa from the Witch had a teller. If you're interested in that, it's in the next lesson. And if not, I thank you again for watching this class. I hope you will leave a review and let me know what else you would like to learn. Until next time, stay creative and I will see you guys. Bye.