In art, coloring human skin is often difficult. Skin is not uniform in color or texture and is often marked by imperfections that are hard to communicate in some media. In animated or cartoon media this is not the case. Animated characters, such as Kikyou from "Inuyasha," are colored in block sections of base color, highlight, and shadow for easy reproduction. Learn to translate Kikyou's color-blocked anime style skin into a realistic skin color.
Instructions
1. Choose a color medium. Use physical materials like colored pencils or paint, or digitally color Kikyou's skin in Photoshop. Choose a paper type that suits your medium.
2. Find reference pictures of Kikyou that show the color of her skin (see Resources). Kikyou is pale in the anime, with some yellow undertones. Look for color references, too, among pictures of real people of Kikyou's ethnicity. Find detailed photos that show the texture of the skin.
3. Create three color palettes. You want a base color palette, a highlight palette and a shadow palette. If you are working in Photoshop, you can lift palette colors from your reference pictures. Work in separate color layers on the computer.
4. Make a light sketch of all aspects of your drawing. If you are working in Photoshop, use the tablet or scan a sketch into the computer. If you are working with more traditional materials, use a light peach colored pencil. Graphite tints color gray, which you do not want showing through skin sections.
5. Pay attention to your light source and note where the colors should be darkest and lightest. You may want to use a reference photo to do this until you become comfortable. Bone structure and muscles create shadow in a very specific way, and your drawing of Kikyou will look very strange indeed if you just make up where highlights and shadows go.
6. Build up color from lightest to darkest. You will be gradually layering darker and darker colors over light colors. Start with white at the areas of direct highlight. Cover the rest with slightly darker colors like peach and jasmine, then move up to the yellow and red shadow undertones that skin has using pink and umber colors. Dark shadows can consist of blues and greens. You may need to do many different layers, sometimes reapplying the lighter colors over dark colors.
7. Create some texture with skin imperfections. Between your color layers, make any beauty marks, scars and pockmarks you'd like to add. Create variation.
8. Deepen your shadows as desired and pay attention to the subtle shadowing that creates facial structure. Be sure they blend naturally with the rest of the colors.
9. Step back and look at your drawing. Make sure you are achieving the color effect that you want. Darken any top-layer imperfections, like the beauty marks.
