Photoshop Tutorial

This Photoshop tutorial focuses on coloring the skin of your character.  Later tutorials will cover eyes, hair, and clothing. Skin is taught first because this allows you to add hair, clothing, etc above the skin.

Photoshop Tutorial Step 1: Sketch & Outline

First sketch your initial drawing on a pad of paper.  The sketch does not have to be perfect; it only has to give you the basic proportions and location of the hair, clothing, and skin.  Once you have the sketch scanned into your computer, open your version of Photoshop and (using a dark brown and small, 3 pt brush) outline the skin of your character on a new layer.

Photoshop Tutorial Step 2: Skin Base

On another new layer (located beneath the Outline layer), color the flatter portion of the skin.  As most skin tones are made up of more than one color, you may want to mix both dark and light skin tones in your character.  In this Photoshop Tutorial, we used a light tan and a white-peach.  The lighter color is visible in the flatter locations: Near the collarbone Across the forehead Down the front of the arm

Once the basic color is set, lock the pixels.  No matter what version of Photoshop you are using, you should have a Layers window in the right side of your screen which looks like the tutorial image below:

 

Photoshop Tutorial Step 3: Shadow (Multiply)

Once you have locked the pixels, duplicate the layer.  This button is located at the top of your Photoshop screen in the Layer menu.


Now, in the duplicated layer, paint everything in the layer white.  If you followed these tutorial steps in order, the pixels should be locked in the duplicate layer too, so you will only be painting where the original skin color was. 

Using the same skin tone that you were previously using (the darker tone), add shadows to your image.  Shadows are found: around the eyes beneath the chin on one side of the arm around the breasts around the collarbone where the hair creates them

With the shadows in place, set the duplicated layer to Multiply. The white will disappear and the shadows will overlay the original skin layer.  If you used the darker skin color from the original layer, the shadows will be a darker version of the same color.

Photoshop Tutorial Step 4: Highlights (Color Dodge)

At this point it is time to put in highlights.  Remember, skin reflects light, making specific areas shiny.  Anywhere there is a raised area, there will be a reflection:

• On the bridge of the nose
• On the arc of both cheeks
• Against the line of the jaw
• On the chin
• On the collarbone
• On the side of the arm (opposite the shadow)

The best way to create these highlights is to create a new layer and set this layer to Color Dodge.  Again, no matter what version of Photoshop you are using, you should have a Layers window which looks similar to the tutorial image to the left. It does not matter color you use to create the highlights, as any marks on the Color Dodge layer will appear as a brighter version of the color beneath it.

Add the highlights to the skin, then create another new layer and color the lips of your character (even males have some color to their lips, though it is significantly less than females).


This concludes our skin Photoshop tutorial; please move on to our next Coloring Anime Drawings in Photoshop tutorial.

Tablets help a lot when working in Photoshop there are multiple Tablets available in our Online Art Store. These range in price from $30 - $2,000.  Visit our Graphics Tablet page to learn more about this tool.