Introduce texture to the skin

I created the facial features and rendered the skin tones on adjacent areas to achieve better blending and transitions. These transitions give the face a non-uniform, natural look. The brushes used on this texture painting process are basically the Soft Airbrush and my customised Skin brush. I keep the Opacity of the brushes very low, around 10 per cent – a key requirement.

Starting on the hair

I select the Soft Airbrush in Manga Studio and paint large areas of the hair, and add light and dark areas to it. Then I define sections of the hair with the Watercolor brush. Now that my hair base is in place, I transfer the image to Photoshop and on a new Normal layer I start rendering the strands using the Soft Rounded standard brush. The aim here is to create a section of strands that I’ll then apply some filters to, such as Gaussian Blur, Balance Color and Feather, to achieve a natural look.