Character Process Page 6
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For the hands and feet. The wrinkles on your fingers and toes, are not deep enough to just get shadowed, so you cant just overlay a greyscale layer. Create a brand new layer for your hand and feet. This should be a middle grey layer, set to overlay, this will make it totally disappear. Then use the dodge and burn tools to sculpt the details of the hand. This layer needs to be above the rainbowlayer, so that it is being overlayed on top of the rainbow, instead of the rainbow on top of the grayscale. This is very important. When it is above the rainbow, it turns the skin subtle hues that simulate the Sub surface scattering properties that skin has. if it is under the rainbow, it will just be darker grey, this will ruin the illusion of skin. The lower picture illustrates the difference. The left one, the details are above the rainbow layer, the right they are below. The difference is subtle, but noticable.

Remember how I said only to do the large scale details in your lightmap? There was a reason. Now create another middle grey layer, set to overlay so it dissapears, and paint all the smaller detail, and muscle striations, any muscles that need more definition than the light map gave them. It is important that this map have about 40% of the volume detail..

Ok, so far you say, this isnt that different from a normal texture tutorial. Many people use this method. Shoot, I didnt even mention using photo overlays, which are a great way to add skin detail, but I wanted to do this one from scratch.

If you were to use all these detail layers to do a flat overlay, you would get an image like this

Now comes the fun part. The image above looks good, but it doesnt really run the full gamut of colors that real skin does. The shadows are what gives it away. They are just darker versions of the same skin color. This is why using overlays usually doesnt work, and why most texture artists resort to painting everything by hand, because they can paint the color into the shadows.

Take your grey scale layers, first your shadow map, then your fine details map (both are still greyscale), and colorize them. Either go to Image>adjustments>hue/saturation, or press ctrl+u. There is a box at the bottom that says colorize. Click this, and the greyscale image will now be a monotone color. Play with the sliders till it looks good with the skin. For mine, it was a deep blue for the light map, and a deep pink for the details layer. You will barely have to shift them, and the color will be barely noticable, but when the skin layer interacts with it, you will get great shadow color in your map. You will have to experiment for a while, it took me a few tries, and Aaryn kept coming out looking like he had used sunless tanning oil, but when your done it should look something like this.

Notice how the image on the right does not seem like skin. It is lacking something. The image on the left, has those nice pink edges and blue shadows. I really turned it up so you could see the difference, but even when it is slight, it will do leaps and bounds for the believability of your skin.

Ok, so now you have great, believable skin tones, but wait, something still seems off. Its because the human body doesnt keep the same saturation all over. Joints, and other parts do not receive as much sun as the majority of your skin, so they are more pale. In order to accomplish this, and keeping with my method of being able to change everything, you dont just want to desaturate your colors, you want to control it, and be able to put it back if need be. So create a new layer, and set the layer blending mode to Saturation. Now wherever you paint with a white brush, it will desaturate the layers below. I painted the elbows, the armpits, the fronts and backs of the knees. The image to the right shows where I painted, the layer is set to normal so you can see the brush marks.

This will result in nice areas of desaturated skin.

There you have it, a great way to paint skin tones. All the flexibility of layers and being able to tweak, and still get great results as if you hand painted everything.