helter skelter in the summer swelter
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
I've never figured out how to color skin. I've been questing for the perfect Flesh Tone ever since endless, frustrating digs through my 64 box of Crayolas in kindergarten.
<< click to see a bigger image
When I started dabbling in computer graphics, I discovered the dropper tool. Finally! I could just pick the appropriate color off of a reference image of a person, and paint with that. An exact replica of skin color! I win!
Ha. It is never that easy. Every color picked up by the dropper was a grayish orange hue. Unless I wanted my portraits to resemble overly tanned zombies, I would have to figure something else out. In the meantime, I cried a lot and wrote bad poetry about my artistic shortcomings.
Actually, I spent a lot (read: too much) time staring at other people's art and...staring at other people (this tactic was probably creepy and difficult to explain: "I couldn't help noticing the yellow undertones of your inner arm. Also, this lighting is making these sweet periwinkle shadows on your face."). I've come to understand that the most effective, most realistic, most lively, and most engaging faces are done with seemingly unexpected colors. In her (fabulous!) tutorial, digital illustrator Linda Bergkvist used colors like orange, coral red, icy turquoise, and purple to bring out the tones in her painting. In this step-by-step tutorial, the artist decided that a dark forest green was a great base color for coloring skin. crazyface!
I decided to give it a try, in my usual biting-off-more-than-I-can-chew way. I picked out some random ass colors, bumbled and felt my way around, and started blending away as I saw fit. Blending is waaay fun. on par with other simple, wholesome pleasures, like finger painting, or oil wrestling. It was all very intuitive and organic (this is fancy schmancypants pretentious artist talk for "I don't know how this happened. Sorry.").
My little skintone experiment in OpenCanvas** is turning into a full-fledged painting. I'm not sure how realistic her skin is, but I like the colors that are turning up. Her face is very...evocative of a sunset. I think this is a good thing.
**an a-mazing Japanese program that simulates the feel and blending of 'real media' like oil or watercolor. if you're a fan of engrish, or cheap digital painting programs, check out their website.
Her eyes are small and wonky. This must be fixed. Also, as cool as her hair may look in its current technicolor state, keep in mind that it's still very much a work in progress. I'm still trying to figure out skin. ...Next Artistic Melodrama? HAIR. eek. stay tuned.
Posted bySHELLY! at 9:32 PM
Labels: opencanvas, skintone, tutorials, work in progress
cooool
I've found, generally speaking, if you can't get something exactly right, do it entirely wrong and call it art.
Make blue people. Or lemon-lime people. Peppermint swirl people. Remember in Kindergarden when you colored your mommy green in her Mother's Day card because it was the closest crayon at hand, and then you glued a lot of noodles to it, and then you ate the noodles and the glue and the crayon? I say you shade that bitch maroon and cover her hair with a German WWI helmet. THAT, my dear, is ART.