How to quickly paint faces

Hi guys (and girls)

It's been way too long since I've posted anything. Reasons for this are family stuff, work stress, changing jobs etc... I just really hope I can post more frequently from now on.

In this article, I would like to cover a trick I recently learned/discovered for painting faces.

It has to do with subdermal colors in the skin. I'll show the pictures first, and explain the reason why later on.

I began by pre-shading the head with black and white paint. This will give you a good indication of where your shadows and highlights should be. If you paint transparently enough, the shadows and highlights will shine through your paint job, but even if you paint more opaque, making a picture of this step will be a good reference!

I loaded my airbrush up with some red paint and sprayed the top half of the face. Make sure to cover the cheekbones, nostrils and the tip of the nose. 

After that, I got the blue paint ready. I used this to spray the bottom half of the face. I also sprayed a little blue over the red in the eye sockets, creating a dark purple. 

With the red and blue colors in place, I continued to paint the face as I usually would. I used the Scale75 skin colors for this. 

You can see that the cheeks and the nose bleed through some of the red color and that the chin has a light blue tone. This gives the illusion of rosy cheeks a five'o'clock shadow. After the skin tones, paint the lips with a red-ish/pink-ish color and paint a little bit of texture on the lower lip. Also highlight the eyelids, nose, upper lip and any wrinkles if they are present on the model, and the face is pretty much done!

Now onto the reasons why...

The central part of a face has fine blood vessels carrying oxidized (red) blood to the surface of the skin. The chin, especially on a black-bearded man, appears blueish due to microscopic hairs. Women and children don't have a five'o'clock shadow but in the area around the lips are relatively more veins carrying deoxidized blood to the surface. Some artists paint this as a green color to compliment the color of the lips. 

Traditionally, there is also a yellow or white zone of the face. This is the forehead that doesn't have as many muscles and blood vessels and thus doesn't have as many red blood cells. 

I hope you liked this little tutorial and that it helps you. If you have any questions feel free to post them in the comment section below.

Thank you for reading and until next time! Peace ✌