Digital Painting and Portraiture for Black Skin

Overview

“My biggest goal in this course is to make you see the beauty of black skin and to incorporate diversity into your work. But as we know, even within the term black skin, there is a wide variety of shades that will require a great deal of knowledge. In addition, the type of lighting will also greatly influence the final result of your piece. What I hope is that you have the autonomy to understand the painting process in a way that you can apply it to any kind of tonality and lighting. In this technique, it is not necessary to have a great knowledge of colors to achieve a satisfactory final result. The most important thing is to know how to represent the volume of shapes. For this, the course project will consist of an illustration with three characters, one with light skin, one with brown skin and another with dark skin – all of them in the same scene and being affected by the same lighting, a sunny day. However, before starting the project, there are some thoughts that we have to change or completely eliminate in order to paint black skin correctly. I've made a lot of mistakes myself before finally understanding the most common mistake: we can't paint black skin the same way we paint Caucasian skin. This not only makes it not true to life, but also makes your painting lifeless. Let's start by looking at how three small shifts in thinking and concepts can make a big difference in the end result? ”

In this video lesson Wilno Fakie addresses the topic: Initial thoughts, which is part of the Domestika online course: Digital Painting and Portraiture for Black Skin. Learn to depict the diversity of African features in Photoshop with the right tones and lighting for each context.

Partial transcription of the video

“initial thoughts Before talking about the main mistakes of painting black skin, I want to tell you that there is no problem in not knowing how to paint black skin. You probably just need a little more study and a clear direction. The difficulty you feel when painting black skin it's the same difficulty I have to paint Caucasian skin, because I've always focused on learning how to paint black skin and also by the lack of resources that approach this theme. I've always heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, therefore, I decided to make a drawing to illustrate what I mean. Here, we ca...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Digital Painting and Portraiture for Black Skin

• Level: Beginner
• 100% positive reviews (21)
• 436 students
• 5 units
• 25 lessons (5h 21m)
• 12 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Software

  Adobe Photoshop

• Areas

  Digital Drawing, Digital Illustration, Digital Painting, Drawing