Skipping ahead, here’s what ended up being the final palette once the piece was done. Thankfully, her outfit colors are also well-coordinated.Īll others in the painting will be made by either changing these colors’ saturation and value (but not hue) and mixing them. I played with the settings until I got one with a medium brown, a blue for the shirt, a green for the background, and a purple for the headband.
CLIP STUDIO PAINT HOTKEYS SKIN
Hearkening back to The Nuts and Bolts of Color Theory, I used an eyedropper sample of her skin to generate a palette with Adobe Color. Layer > New Fill Layer > Set it to 50% gray I typically start with 50% gray, then cover it with other neutral colors during the “flatting” stage. It’s far easier to start with a middle tone and paint on highlights and shadows, than to start at the brightest value and paint literally everything else.
One of the most common pieces of digital art advice you’ll find is to start from a medium-toned canvas instead of white. I’m using the Darker Pencil, but it doesn’t matter which tool you use. Many more experienced painters prefer to work without lines or flats, and their power is awe-inspiring, but this can save you work. Then I draw some very thin lineart, so I don’t have to worry about reshaping the features as I keep painting. You can use any color, but mine will be white. I add a paper layer: a background fill layer that can’t be moved or erased.
If you want a perfect likeness, take a photo. Some proportions are exaggerated-slightly wider smile and eyes-since copying every detail of the photo directly tends to result in more muted expressions than you might want in a drawing. it’s just a placeholder for edges that are going to be much softer, so I’m just noting where those creases are, not how strong they’ll be. If this was going to be a line drawing, I wouldn’t have gone into even this much detail: Using hard lines for every facial crease makes the subject look older. The pencil sketch was fairly close for being done from observation with no measuring, but this gets it a bit closer: I’ll be painting u/Inuwa-Angel from Reddit, with thanks for her portrait request and permission to use it for this article.Īfter starting with a paper sketch, I use the polygonal lasso and move tools to make some corrections.
This was on by default, but I turned it off because it adds another layer of complexity.