Hey guys, this is Matt Kor from ControlPaint.com and today we're going to talk about painting skin inside of Photoshop. It's likely that a lot of the practice that you get drawing is painting stuff like this. Solid objects. A stone statue looks like a face, but the surface doesn't behave like skin. And the primary difference is that light goes into human skin and scatters around. And that softens and colors the shadows. On this statue, the shadows are sort of just a darker version of the highlighted side. But here's a screenshot from a tech demo that really shows off this idea. You can see that the skin is just a bit more colorful in the shadows. There's actually sort of different hues on different areas of the shadow and the light. And this next example really exaggerates that fact. So when bright light passes through our thin skin like ears and nose, you can see a bright red color. And obviously this would not happen with a statue. And when you look at this Rembrandt painting, you can see that there are different colors in the different parts of the skin. So the shadow might have one primary color, the mid tone might have sort of a different hue, and then the highlights on the skin are less saturated. And part of what makes this look so realistic is that Rembrandt paid really close attention to the subtle shifts in hue across his skin. Now I do not have a secret for painting skin. It is a tricky subject. But one of the first things you can do to get better at it is to just look carefully at examples to study skin. So here's just a basic ball with a simple lighting situation. But using the gradient map feature inside a Photoshop, I can actually replace all these gray scale values with color. And so you can see really quickly, I'm able to have Photoshop do all the heavy lifting and to apply a gradation where I used to have gray scale values. Well in order to study this effect of light on skin, I've taken a screenshot from the movie The Godfather. And then I've also taken a screenshot from the black and white classic The Maltese Falcon. My goal is going to be to recreate the colors from the left screenshot onto the Maltese Falcon. And here are my results. So you can see it is a overall coloration of the entire image, so it's not just his skin. But you can see here I've really paid careful attention to the hue shift from light to shadow. And this is the gradient remap that I used. Here I've taken a totally different shot from the movie Tron. Now this happens to be a CG still, it's not an actual person, but the lighting is still really cool and very different. So it's another great test to try out the same technique. And here you can see I've had to look really carefully at the fall off from light into shadow. Because in this there are very cool shadows, but then the mid tones warm up quite a bit. And then finally the glossy wet highlights are back to cool again. And I made sure to take that into account when I used my gradient. And so this gradient right here is the one that created this colorization. And when you compare these two gradients, they're very different. And this points out a really important aspect of skin. There's never a single skin tone. It has a lot to do with the lighting that the character is sitting in. So if you're having trouble painting skin and the color is just not coming out right, take a step back and try this exercise. Get some black and white screenshots from old movies, things with a face in the foreground. And then try and remap the gradient to match another color screenshot. This may not be actual painting, but what you're doing is critically observing skin and critically observing color. And if you can do that, painting it is just one more step. And stick around for part two later this week in which I'm going to talk about a similar technique to be used in your illustration process. Thanks for coming to Control Paint, guys.