Colouring faces

This post is showing one method of colouring faces on character stamps. It's worth learning how to do faces as they are the first part of a finished image that your eye is drawn to, and your attention is held here more than anywhere else, which means that you can get away with less than perfect colouring elsewhere if your character's face looks good.

There are probably many ways to colour a face, but this method works well with stamps like the Magnolia range and simple characters, and is a good basic technique that you can adapt for more complex images when you're more practised. It lays down the different shades in sequence, fully blending each layer with the last each time.

All the pictures are clickable to get a bigger and better view.

You'll need 3 skin tone colours, one very pale for highlight areas, one a little darker as your main skin tone, and one a little darker still as a shadow. You'll also need a pink or yellow-red pen as a cheek colour. In this example I've used E000 (highlight), E00 (midtone), E21 (shader) and R20 (cheeks).

These are the shades I'm using:

I use my palest shade (E000) and go over most of the face; I don't go all the way up to the outer line as a way of reducing the likelihood of the ink feathering:

I take my midtone (E00) and use it over the 2 sides of the face and the forehead:

Then I use my palest shade (E000) and go over the whole face again to blend in the second colour (again, I don't go right up to the black line):

Then with my darkest shade, the E21, I apply some shadows: under the fringe and down the sides of the face:

Next, I go over the face with the E00 and the E000 again to blend in each colour:

The next step is to add the cheek colour: I just dab the marker lightly over the cheek area while the E000/E00/E21 are still wet - this will cause the R20 to bleed into the wet ink and give a nice blurry edge and avoid that unnatural 'painted doll' look. I had to break for a minute to take this photo, which allowed my ink to dry too much and so you can see on the right hand side where the dabs of R20 didn't blur very well. Usually, I would have done this quick enough:

Then, I go back over the face with E00 and E000 again to blend in nicely, covering the same areas with these colours as I did before; this makes the cheek colour more subtle and disguises the harder lines of some of those dabs of R20:

I thought the image needed a bit more shading, so I went back and put in a little more E21 to darken the shaded areas a little, then finished up by a final layer of E000 which I took up to the edges of the face:

As you can see, this method is laying down a lot of colour so you are at risk of the ink feathering over the black lines, and this photo shows some of the skin colour has bled into the collar. The 2nd photo shows the ink being pushed back using the Blender pen.

This is the finished result - the feathering has been corrected, and I've used a white gel pen to put dots on the cheeks which draw the eye in and just finish the face off:

This method makes the most of blending all the colours well. Tomorrow, I'll show a simplified version of this method which will reduce the risk of feathering.

Happy colouring!

Carole x