How to Create Skin Texture With a Color Pencil

Find out how you can shade realistic skin textures with your color pencils.

Shading a drawing brings the image to life, adding depth and textures to the artwork. Shading skins can be challenging, especially when trying to create convincing shadows and highlights around a subject's face. Texturing and shading skin with a color pencil can be even more challenging than a gray-scale pencil. But by following some basic guidelines and developing your technique, you can get realist skin texture out of your color pencils.

Instructions

1. Select the color pencil from your set that best matches the color of your subject's skin tone, whether your subject is real or imagined -- this pencil will be used for midtones. Select a darker variant of the first pencil color to use for shadows on your subject's skin.

2. Shade in your subject's skin. Begin drawing tiny, overlapping circles to shade. Intensify the pressure on your pencil, and group your circles more tightly for darker areas. Lessen your pressure and circle-grouping for lighter area. You can omit the highlights of your subject's skin for a more pronounced lighting effect.

3. Use your darker pencil to accent the shadowy areas on your subject's skin. Intensify the circle-groupings and pressure to give your shadow depth.

4. Blend your shadows into the adjacent midtones by smearing the colors with a finger or cotton swab. Blend the borders of your midtones into your highlights in similar fashion. Optionally, you can lightly smear the colored areas to give your drawing a more uniformed look.

References

• DueysDrawings; Shading Tutorial; Brian Duey; 2008