kissy kissy killer kitty (spacemonkey) wrote in pbsbyariel, @ 2010-10-15 19:11:00 |
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If you play in superhero comic book or sci-fi fandom, chances are you'll run into a character with some wacky skin colour. Maybe they're a mutant or an alien. Maybe this character has no canon PB, or you don't like the one they were given, or just generally cannot use them. You don't have the benefit of tracking down your PB and slathering them in special effects make up, so you have to make do with Photoshop. This can be a pretty daunting prospect and I'm not gonna lie, it is a lot of work, especially to make quality manips instead of just slapping on a Colour layer and calling it a day. After years of playing these types of characters, I've developed quite a few different techniques on how to make odd-coloured skin look closer to real than Photoshopped. This technique works best with characters with light, warm-toned skin--pink, red, orange, etc. I'll do another tutorial down the line on how to do characters like Nocturne and Mystique, who have very dark, cool-toned skin. First things first, when I'm doing extensive manip work, I crop the icon the way I want it first. This keeps me from having to manip a lot of shit that won't end up in the icon, which would be a waste of my time. When I like my crop, I duplicate the bottom layer. Sometimes I isolate the parts I'm going to change the colour of; sometimes I leave that for later. In this particular instance, her skin is easily 3/4ths of the icon, so I'll leave the cleaning up for later. With the new layer selected, open up the Variations window. I've already explained what each of these options does in my hair colour tutorial, but it's pretty simple to figure out just from playing around with it. For Clarice, I added a lot of Red, Magenta, and Cyan until I got a shade of pink I was satisfied with. I also played around with Lighter/Darker to get the right skin tone; Stam's pale skin is a bit lighter than I want Clarice's pink skin to be. This is what I end up with. In this step, I erased everything that is not her skin. This includes her hair, her nails, her rings, her eyes, the background, and in this case, her lips. She's clearly wearing red lipstick, which wouldn't change tone with the skin. I left her eyebrows in because hers are pretty light and sprase; generally, I run over them a few times with a soft eraser with a very light opacity. I duplicated the layer and set the bottom one to Multiply and the top one to Colour. The Multiply layer gives a little bit of weight to the skin colour; this is especially useful for characters who have darker skin like Nocturne and Mystique. For Clarice, I'll end up lowering the opacity on the Multiply layer quite a bit. You can experiment in this step with various layer effects and see what looks best for you. Reducing the opacity by 50% on the Colour layer and ... some other percent on the Multiply (it was a long time ago, haha, I forget) gives me a skin tone that I like quite a bit. It looks like real skin; it's not uniform in hue and saturation. Skin colour changes depending on the light source and what's around you; certain colour light can reflect on your skin. Now I'm gonna focus on her eyes. I create a new layer and using a very pale green, I colour over them and set the layer to Screen. This lightens them up severely. It's also pretty obvious; since we're shrinking the image I don't fiddle around too much with it. On another new layer on top of this, I colour the entire eye with that same green and set it to Colour. I also alter the Screen layer's opacity. Characters like Clarice have a uniform eye colour with no visible pupil or iris. To be a little bit more realistic, I want just a hint of iris and pupil. And now, for Clarice's markings. I create a PSD template for these so I can just load them up and use the Transform tool to make them fit the angle and size of her face quickly and easily. Generally I paste them on, change their shape so they fit, and set them to Multiple and then alter the opacity until they're faint but visible. For some aspects--like Clarice's eye marking--I just freehand them (...poorly, lmao) with a combination of the brush and eraser tools. This is all I have to do until I'm technically finished; from here on out it's all about shrinking the image down and then fiddling with various layers' opacities until I think it looks all right. Then I process the icon as normal--altering Curves, Brightness, Contrast, and Sharpening. THINGS THAT MAKE THIS EASIER: - Hair colour that already closely resembles the character's. A redhead for someone with pink, red, or orange hair. Someone with dark brown black hair for a character with dark hair. A platinum blonde for someone with white hair. - Light-coloured eyes; they lend themselves better to whiting out the character's eyes. - Well-lit images without any strange lighting effects or colourations. TIPS ON SOLID COLOUR EYES: When you're shrinking an image very small, lower the screen layer's opacity. This will result in a cloudy appearance with a hint of iris. If you leave the opacity on 100%, it will look very bright and saturated in comparison to the rest of the figure, in addition to a bit too sharp, and the effect is very fake. I usually mess with the opacity of the eye's screen layer after I've shrunk the image to 100x100. REMEMBER: Comics are a visual, 2D medium. They're bright and colourful. A lot of the shit comic artists, inkers and colourers can get away with don't translate well to the three dimensional world. That's why many cosplayers look like, well, people in a costume, and not actual people you'd see walking around; they interpret colours a bit too faithfully and literally. It's also why they put movie!Wolverine in black leather instead of yellow spandex. When manipping, subtlety is your friend; lower that opacity! Use more muted colours! CREATE A TEMPLATE: When doing characters with lots of markings, it's much easier to create one template and then distort it for the model's pose than it is to try to recreate it and get a consistent look. For Clarice, I created a template for the diamond on her forehead by distorting a large pink square into a diamond shape. Then I pasted it as a new layer on the photo manip, rotated it to match the tilt of her head, and shrunk it down to about the proportion it should have been. |