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STEP 10

Airbrush, size: 20-40 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #5C2B29 [MODE]

Our girl needs a bit of eye shadow, and also some shading on her shadow side, especially on the left side of the left upper lid. Apply as shown, using a brush size of 40 for the cheek and jaw, 30 for the eyes, eyebrows, and nose shadow, and 20 if you want to touch up the ears a bit, as I did here.

STEP 11

Airbrush, size: 30 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #FEFDF4 [MODE]

Having added shading in the last step, we will now punch up the real highlights again. Remember where your light is coming from, and where some of the most protruding elements of your face are, that would catch the light and throw it in the direction of your (the viewer's) eyes.

The tip of the nose is a given, and a bit on the forehead, upper right cheekbone, and right side of chin. One area on the face that usually has a bright highlight and is NOT a protrusion is the bridge of the nose. You will find that frequently, it's the brightest highlight on a face! Well, it might not be a protrusion, but it is concave, and concavities cause light to pool.

Airbrush, size: 8 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #D0C0B8 [MODE]

The highlights in the eyes are really never pure white. So far, I have just left them open, allowing the white canvas below to shine through. Now, however, I'm toning them down to a warm grey. I've also tried shaping them a bit, and worked a little on the pupils to make the highlights more even.

STEP 12

Airbrush; Shape: round; Size: 10; Transparency: 80; Soft Edge: 00
Hex #D83230. [MODE]

Now I want to blend the lips in with the face a bit, so with the lipstick color, I airbrushed a softer border where lip and skin meet.

Airbrush; Shape: round; Size: 15; Transparency: 85; Soft Edge: 50
Hex #E4AC87. [MODE]

Here I used the skin tone to blend the right jaw outline into the cheek better.

Airbrush; Shape: round; Size: 15; Transparency: 85; Soft Edge: 50
Hex #E9B7A5. [MODE]

Here I blended the reflected light on the shadow side of the face, along the left jaw line.

Airbrush; Shape: round; Size: 15; Transparency: 85; Soft Edge: 50
#BA6E5A

And finally, toward the rear of the left jaw line, where there is no reflected light, I blended the shaded tones together so that the outline isn't visible.

Airbrush; Shape: round; Size: 15; Transparency: 85; Soft Edge: 50
#552A1F

Bit of shading on the left side of mouth, and even a bit under the right side of the upper lip.

I've shown all of these final tweakings with the same green fill.

I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't done the same tweakings to the outline around the top of the cranium, because it will be covered with hair. I've also left the ears somewhat undeveloped for the same reason.

For now, I will call this finished. I'm sure I could develop it even further, but it's not necessary. I also could have stopped sooner. That's the beauty of art -- you decide when you're done.

I should also point out that if I were to do this tutorial over, and decided to use the same faces as my reference models, it would probably look different. So if yours looks different from mine, that's a GOOD thing!

Thank you for participating thus far. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, but even more so, I hope you can take some of the ideas away with you. Our final tutorial will deal with hair. See you then!

GALLERY OF FACES

Young ones, old ones, smiling ones, frowning ones, sketchy ones, finished ones. You have seen the individual features of many of these faces; now here they are in their faces. All were created with PhotoImpact 10, using different digital media: pencil, charcoal, marker, and airbrush.

It is my great regret that all of the reference photos I used for these sketches were taken with a flash. So the lighting is flat and unimaginative. However, I think the personalities of these people still do shine in their faces. Do you agree?

If you want to improve your drawing and painting of the human face, take a little sketchbook with you everywhere, look at your subjects closely, and sketch, sketch, sketch!

NOTE:

I'm not always going to be giving you specifics , because you might not have to do the same kind of tweaking. Or, you might have to do something I didn't have to do. Since we are not painting the exact same painting, I leave it to you to tweak yours as you see fit. But I'm telling you exactly what I'm doing in the hope that my analysis and thought process will teach you something.

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STEP 8

Airbrush, size: 150 Transparency: 20 Soft Edge: 100 Preset: None
Hex #A4FF3C [MODE]

Now we are going to add "magic green." What?--you might ask... but trust me on this, there is A LOT of green in skin tones. It's not the first thing we see, to be sure, but the longer we look at skin, and try to discern what colors are really going on in there, the more we see that there is not only the expected peachy-pink you remember from your crayon box, but greens and purples, sometimes also yellows and even blues.

[Why do I refer to it as "magic green?" This comes from the painting workshops I've taken in Woodstock, NY. Our master had this yellow green paint in his palette, and we all thought it a very odd color for a figure painting class. But when we started mixing it into our "flesh" tones, we were all astonished at the beauty of the shades we were getting, so we started calling it "magic green."]

NOTE: This is one of those examples that demonstrates exactly why I use the digital airbrush to paint skin. If we were to just paint this green full strength over everything, it would just tone the skin slightly, and allow the original skin tones to shine through -- it would definitely be too strong. The airbrush gives us skin's natural transparency.

I almost changed the fill color for this step, because I try to make it something very complimentary, and this one is green, after all. So filling it with green seems wrong, somehow. However, after trying fuchsia, purple, and blue, I decided that it would be easier for you to judge just how much of our "magic" yellow green to apply, here. As you can see, it's just a very light, almost ephemeral amount.

STEP 7

Airbrush, size: 50 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #F4D2A0 [MODE]

It seems that all of the darkening we've been doing has made the lights too light. We don't want that much contrast. And we also need to warm up the skin tones a bit, so I'm using this hue to achieve both of those ends by filling in the light areas. But since I don't want this yellowish tone to be on top of all the modeling we've done, I'm going to select it in Layer Manager, and drag it below the lips! [The lips should be the first thing above the outline.]

Note: This is a perfect example of how we must always judge how the whole painting is looking, and adjust things as needed. In this case, the 'whole painting' is just the face, since the face is the only subject of this tutorial.

STEP 9
(Multiple steps -- please read everything)
Airbrush, size: 4 Transparency: 40 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #4C2B21 [MODE]

With a light touch, enhance the lid creases, draw in the lashes and eyebrows, and some other areas that might need small amounts of shading.

I selected the irises, and dodged an area opposite the eyes' highlight to brighten the contrast. It became too yellow and too bright, so I used the lasso tool to cut out the affected area, used the Color Balance to make it greener, then the Brightness & Contrast Button to darken it a bit and give it less contrast. My base outline sketch happened to show through the eyes' highlights, so I also took this opportunity to erase those line segments, but only in eye highlights.

I selected the shadows on the whites of the eyes, and erased a bit here and there in order to highlight them from the right more, with the eraser set at size 13, with a 98% transparency. I pick a center of the highlight-to-be, and start making circles from there, enlarging them as I move out in a spiral fashion. That keeps the edges as soft as possible.

Airbrush, size: 40 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #4C332C

Then I selected the whites of the eyes, and airbrushed a shadow on the left side of the left eye only (corresponding with the shadow side of the face). I think this has brought out more life in the eyes -- what do you think? I couldn't have done this, before, since we were doing the eyes in a vacuum. Now that we have a face, we have to tweak the features we've already done so that they will believably fit into this face.

Airbrush, size: 16 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #BD2C00

The whites of eyes are typically a bit bloodshot near the outer edges, so I swished the airbrush a bit around them. I also reddened the tops of the lower lids a bit.

STEP 9
(Multiple steps -- please read everything)
Airbrush, size: 4 Transparency: 40 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #4C2B21 [MODE]

With a light touch, enhance the lid creases, draw in the lashes and eyebrows, and some other areas that might need small amounts of shading. [Shown in cyan.]

Airbrush, size: 40 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #4C332C

Airbrush, size: 16 Transparency: 80 Soft Edge: 50 Preset: None
Hex #BD2C00

The whites of eyes are typically a bit bloodshot near the outer edges, so I swished the airbrush a bit around them. I also reddened the tops of the lower lids a bit. [Shown in green.]

I also put a little shadow under the center of her nose. [Fuchsia]