How To Paint REALISTIC Skin (Luminous Skin Tutorial)

okay this is the reference and this is what i see when i squint and i've decided that i don't want to paint this gray wall which i see on the reference it looks pretty boring so i've decided to combine the dark shapes all together and to work with the shapes with the shadows towards cooler red side normally i start with Romer but in this case i've decided to go directly with with the mixture i would like to see in the in the final painting i'm using the biggest brush which i have in studio normally i use this brush for grounds but i thought it could be just funny to work with a big brush and with the other tools so sometimes it's just nice to create such textures by scrubbing it in and scraping the paint off this painting is more about experimentation than the result so i feel myself really free here i don't care about likeness what i'm really focused on is how to make colors more interesting more vibrant and how to paint this portrait with a thicker paint but so far you see it's more like adding and removing with both with brush and with the card and sometimes with other things and for me i don't for me the background looks already quite interesting and you can see on the top right corner it is already dry so it is also quite interesting effect of working very very thinly in the beginning so i continue to squint and i i just try to find the proper balance between the modeling modeling very very approximate shapes for now but every time every time i deal with a three-quarter lighting or something similar i'm really focused on making one side of the face one side of the head lighter than other side of the head i mean in the light so the the most important difference should be between the halftones in the light the the planes which are next to the core shadow should be darker than the opposite plate it will it will create really strong illusion of three-dimensionality of the head and i highly recommend to focus on difference in the values of the lights because it is very easy to find the difference between the shadows and the lights in the beginning but the difference in in the halftones in the light it is more important for for proper representation or at least equally important so here as you can see on the palette i mix a lot so i load these brushes and i apply very thick layers of paint right away and instead of instead of choosing proper value and proper mixture i go very free and i try to i try to amplify what i see to make mixture lighter and more saturated to push it in in terms of color and temperature and just to work with the with the paint on on the canvas on the panel not not on the palette so the actual mixing is happening on the panel as well and if i want to fix something let's say i want to make value darker or i want to change the design of the shape i don't erase and i'm not scrape away the paint i i blend what already is there and i try to to work slightly more like a sculpture sculptor here just shaping moving adding and it is really essential to to organize your brushes here because you don't want to contaminate the big pile of paint which you are which you have on the panel so few brushes for the lights few brushes for darks and be very careful do not do not mess them up so as you can see i use i try to create um complementary complementary vibrancy here using some greens in the halftones especially in transitional halftones because i have some reds in the shadows and i'm obviously have some reds in the lips and the nose and the cheekbones some beautiful things and i don't want to create monotonous monochromatic painting so the best way is to introduce some greens to create additional vibrancy and to see how i can change the temperatures warm to cool warm to cool this type of so uh we have warm shadow the transitional halftone is going to be cool kind of green after that warm halftone in the light again and the cool pink halftone or lightest halftone in the light and finally some yellow highlights or something and you see the deepest darks like occlusions or the the background mixture which i'm using now to to create a silhouette of the head is again cooler than the shadow so it is cool warm cool warm cool color skin which can be really pleasing so now you see that i still use the card to create nice nice brush marks because i i like to have the skin smoothly rendered especially in the lips and the nose round eyes but outwards from the focal point it is very pleasing for my eye to see some kind of dynamic composition some kind of chaotic representation so i try to combine in this sketch i try to combine abstract and realistic approach one i wanted to look fresh like through our primo painting so this this one is uh had no second layer everything was done in the single sitting just in in one session and i really like the outcome so i constantly make decisions about maybe i should smooth things out so i'm using fan brush or bigger brushes or just a lot of brush work to to blend it with the long filbers which i use now on the video and every time i want to introduce smaller plane changes like subtle planes or smaller planes i try to constantly change the temperature so you can see some gray on top of the orange or some pinks on top of the of the reds oh i'm sorry of the blues or vice versa if there are a lot of yellow there will go some blue or if it is too cool i will just apply something warmer like in the cheekbone there as you can see on the palette i i clean the palette very often in this sketch and this this is important normally i don't do that but here with a thicker paint application i'm i try i try to be in control if you paint thinly and you do mistake you can just paint over the the area and fix fix the problem but if the area is painted already thickly yeah it is going to be a trouble if you mess up the temperature as i already said before and as usual i make the darks darker during the process so i don't jump into the darkest darks right away and i don't do and i don't apply lightest lights neither although it is also yeah this is absolutely possible to paint the way when you when you mail down the darks and lights right away but for me i prefer to build the form gradually so smoothing out transitions and it is very easy to do if if you have thick paint application so more paint when it is wet easier to to make things make transitions smoother or just to control to control gradation if you need to and all these layers all these different mixtures now they are blending into each other creating nice translucent effect of the skin which which i'm looking for as usual the highlights in the eyes with the with the sharpest tool i have with the tip of the palette knife so technically all the decisions all important decisions were made in the very beginning it is a placement of the head on the canvas on the panel decision of the combining the value and the color of the background and now just separating two darks using darker and cooler dark for the for the shadows and the rest is just is just building up and rendering and also quite important thing here is a difference in halftones you can see clearly now the right part of the face right for us is clearly lighter than the than the left part which is also part of the light family of values so now clean the palette again i don't know how many times already three times in three hours clean and also using clean brushes in the beginning i was using mostly ivories because they they can be loaded very very heavily we can we can load a lot of pigments into ivory and now i use long field birds kind of synthetic mongoose brushes for delicate brushwork for precision in the brush marks and for smoothing out yeah like that you see so if if you did mistake you can just carefully blend the problem problem brush mark in into into existing layer of wet paint and when it comes to colors the most important is to just to maintain warm and cool relationships between the different mixtures and different values i believe it is more important than trying to copy the colors which you see all on the floor when you paint from life it is it can be okay to to copy the colors but photograph is not the best source of the color so now with the with the just with the background with the with the composition you see i have red and green just for the sake of variety yeah now it's time for the highlight and and you can see now on the forehead i have lightest light which is yellow on top of the pink so i i like to do such complex highlights because they they gradually build build the value towards the very small spot which is technically just a reflection of the light source but if you keep the temperatures on opposite sides of the wheel it will create additional vibrancy in the highlight quite opposite to chalky effect which you can see many times when when you just use a lot of titanium white in the light and i i use this lightest light only in that part of the head because every time when the light source is situated above and we can clearly see it by just looking at the shadows especially the cast shadow on the nose so every time the light is not frontal there should be just one side of the face in this case it's right right side of the forehead which is which has the actual lightest light so everything down below especially the chin way darker this is absolutely important just applying few lights in the cheekbone and and the chin will will ruin the illusion of the head the proper three-dimensional illusion so keep your eye on your value hierarchy all the time in the beginning in the middle of the process and especially in the end because these decisions then yes you're going to sign it and if it is our prima it is going to be there so just modeling applying more highlights some purples for the hair i deliberately ignored the piercing in her nose because for a prima for just one sitting session it is better to sacrifice such things and to concentrate on on the skin tones proper head representation you can always add some such things later because if if if you want to be successful in our prima as i as i've learned by myself you have to be very strategic with your time so when i paint from life i constantly look at my watches and i and i create some kind of plan and a schedule so i break three hours into certain segments blocking the values approximate colors for the light and finally so this is pretty much it i hope you liked it there is a longer version which is edited and clean so i highly recommend to watch it if you have any questions just send me a message on discord or through patreon and see you next time thank you so much for watching bye