Skin tones and womany shapes.

[ThreeOhFour]

Hey there, Critics Lounge folks.

Sorry I haven't visited you guys much lately, but I am looking for a bit more help.

The object of today's drawing practice was for me to practice both the female form (which I have struggled with for some time now) and human skin colours (as opposed to my normal blue and green skin tones )

The end result is basically Ben304 drawing half naked ladies. Hey, it worked for MashPotato

Anyhow, this is where I have gotten:



As you can see, the one I hate the most is the light skin tone - I cannot stand it so much that I had to stop drawing with it. I'd love some pointers on how you go about getting your skin tones, especially light ones.

Also any other comments you have or edits or whatever are always appreciated by me, in case you forgot since last time .

Thanks for reading!

[radiowaves]

My god damn Firefox 3 fucks up the zoomed pictures, making them all blurry ugh. But seems nice. Continue.

[Ghost]

I usually stick to a paler palette, but for a game, the left and right ladies are very good- the girl in the pants has a nice, saturated skin tone with good contrast, the dark-skinned one looks less sharply contrasted but still totally "believeable".

As for my own palette choices, I usually start with R 253 / G 198 / B 137 as a "fix point and select a slight variation of that as base colour, then adding a slightly darker and a uch darker variant. For my very first spriting attempts I found me some screenshots from Indy4 and simply stole the colours, but found the result not matching my style.

Just for fun I took the liberty to copy Beverly's palette over to your girl, noticing that you use one additional shade. The result isn't that different...
x2

Then again, Ben going for a normal skin colour? Let's check, has hell frozen over yet? 

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I've made an edit to show you how I would go about selecting pinkish skin tones.  What I will typically do is start with 3 skin tones:  a shadow, a mid tone, and a highlight, and I make the shadow first and then tweak the other two until they have good contrast between them.  My usual color choice for normal skin is either to use more red and blue (favoring the red) or red and green (favoring the red again).  This will either give you reddish hues with a bit of purple or reddish hues with a bit of brown.  In this case I went with red-blue to make a slightly purple shadow and worked from there.






The thing to bear in mind is that not everyone will agree or like your skin tone choices no matter how realistic you think they appear, and unless a person really tweaks their monitor no two colors appear the same, anyway.  The key here is the semblance of natural skin tone while maintaining a good contrast between hues so each color stands out.


Since you're wanting more realistic anatomy, the first thing you want to do is look at images of real women (preferably nude) as a visual reference for your drawing.  You can always use the x heads rule, but in reality people come in all shapes and sizes, so I tend to play rather loose with the 8/7 heads rule, often using 6-6.5 for women and 7-7.5 for men (though this changes based on whether I want a more cartoony or more realistic appearance).  The edit above follows my preference of 6 heads, so I had to reduce the size of the original's head somewhat and go from there, and I really didn't put too much effort into the legs or arms aside from establishing visually pleasing proportions.  If you want to really work anatomy into your art you will want to start with realistic figures first and then (and only then) work what you've learned into cartoon design.  It's easy to bend rules once you know them, so get looking at some nude women!

[ThreeOhFour]

Radiowaves: Yeah, the blurry zoom trick is one I forgot about because I use Firefox 2 . Next time I'll resize the pics before I upload em .

Ghost: Thanks for the comments, I see how Beverly's skin tone is similar but still quite a bit different to my choice. Interesting base colour, more yellow than what I would normally choose, but it works well so something I will keep in mind. Hell may have frozen over, we cannot be sure

ProgZ: Hooray! Thanks for the big paintover . I see how you got your lighter skin tone - I was moving towards green, thinking that going for yellow would make it lighter, going for purple would make it darker, but I can see that moving towards purple work as well. That's something I didn't realise, and mucho useful! I now see that my characters (especially the blue haired one) have enormous bobble heads and am ashamed of them!

[Ryan Timothy B]

I now see that my characters (especially the blue haired one) have enormous bobble heads and am ashamed of them!

Yes, compared to Progz's more realistic example, they are very bobble headed.  But when you view just the two of your characters side by side, the large head is something I actually like.  It always depends on the type of game you are making.  If it's a cartoony and/or comedy game, go with the bigger head (or something larger than normal at least).  If you're going for a more serious game, go with the more atomically correct version.

Obviously this is just my opinion and definitely not a rule.

Anyway, the forehead in your 'large' headed, blue haired girl, I felt was a few pixels too high.  But I do like your style better and would prefer it much more.  Although Progz's edit is very attractive and quite good.

Oh, and I noticed one thing with Progz's edit verses yours... is that with the 'pillow' shading--if you can call it that--on the belt area of the girls stomach (your version) makes her look like she has a small beer gut.

Also looking at the angled down feet on the blue haired girl, it gives her a floating look... even when looking at your version with the two different girls (figured I'd add that since you may have thought I was comparing the way your version's feet were angled compared to Progz's, which would definitely make yours look like it's floating).  The tribal looking girl doesn't appear to have that floating look though.

Oh yeah, and great work.  I've always enjoyed your character style, it's always very pleasing to see them.

[ThreeOhFour]

Thanks, Ryan. I agree that her forehead is one row of pixels too high, but no more than that . Lowering it more that 1 pixel makes her look quite alienish. Also, I don't see the problem with giving the woman a bit of a belly (not that it was intentional ). I already knew the feet suck. I still hate drawing feet. I hope to get my characters looking sort of like a cross between what they are now and slightly more realistic, so I certainly won't totally abandon the way I draw them, do not worry .

Anyhow, I spent a bit of time mixing colours to try and get a better light skin tone going, and this is the result:



The first one is just the tan tone for comparison, from there I kept blending and mixing colours until I ended up at the last one, which imo is the best out of the row of light ones.

Your thoughts?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think the last 4 are all good.