Scott Spencer: Painting Skin Tutorial - Using PolyPaint

A few months ago, Scott Spencer created a really powerful skin painting tutorial and put it up on Veoh.

Check out the ZBrushCentral thread here.

Scott provides a breakdown here:

Fill a base color on the model. Click here for a more info on PolyPainting.

Using a dot alpha set to spray stroke with the color modifier set to 0 spray reds blues and yellows on the whole head

I isolate these based on color temapture zones on the face.

• warm: cheeks, ears, nose, chest, sometimes neck
• gold/yellow: forehead, areas where the skin is thinner and bone is close to the surface, bridge of nose, clavicles, temporal ridge, chin
• cool: beard line , lower jaw, temples, recesses

Once these overstated colors are blocked in I cover the entire head with a fine layer of little white squiggle lines
once thats done I switch to a skin shader then with a standard brush set to a VERY low opacity ( 3 or 4) I mist a version of the base color over the whole head. This pushes all those colors back into the skin.

I switch back to the spray brush and add in reds, blues, yellows, and cool grays where needed.

In the end I use cavity masking to paint into the detail a light warm brown.