Creating a Face

Probably one of the more difficult taks for the amateur artist is creating a good looking face. I see a full range of attempts from the 'stick-man' approach (two large round eyes, and a line for a mouth) to pasting on a digitized photo to the face. The stick-man approach for the most part is obviously not going to make the cut , unless for some reason you were creating a stick-man skin? And the digitized photo approach has some potential, but often the shortcoming there is that the face isn't suited exactly to the way the mappings are created OR the realism level of the face will not end up matching the realism level of the rest of the skin as well as it wont match the realism level of the game itself (unless the game is photo-realstic, and if you know a photo-realistic game as of 3/99 please let me know..? hehe)

There are several ways from this point to go about creating a face. The most important part of the process though is being able to fully visualize what that face is going to look like.  If neccesary you may want to use a picture as a starting point to try to paint a face simliar to. In any case, trying to create a face, which you have no concept of what it should look like, will most likely prove to be a dismal failure.

I want to stress here that the face of any character be it human or non-human is probably the single most important part of your skin. The face is what people look at first most often, and a poorly done face will give your audience a bad first impression. A well done face will make people impressed when they see your work, and be more receptive to the rest of it. Take time on faces, and get them down. If you master faces you will indeed be on your way to becoming a great skin artist.

For my example I am going to create a black male's face. The character is going to be a tough fighter type with those 'sleepy' looking eyes that are charactaristic of dangerous characters who are so confident they appear to be totally relaxed.

First your going to need a 'wireframe' of the mapping that was created for you to paint on. For this I have created a generic mapping as I don't want to focus here on suitability for any particular model, just the creation of a face. The next thing I do is increase the image size by 200% most of the time. Depending on your art program you will find an option to rescale, resize, or resample the image. If your image was 100x100 pixels, then you would scale it up to 200x200. Quite often your program will have a check box that allows for 'uniform scaling' so if you increase one of the numbers then it will automatically adjust the second number to keep the proper proportions for the image.  Remember to take note of the original image size because you will have to scale it back down to use when your done.

Wireframe's can be daunting when you first start creating skins. They may seem like they don't make any sense, and you can't relate what areas belong where. My favorite technique here is to simply create a blotch of color on the skin and view it on the model, and see where it comes out. This will help you realize what peices of the wireframe correspond to what area of the model.

Now obviously I have provided us with a wireframe of the characters FACE here so the confusion is cut down considerably. What I haven't shown here is that many wireframes start off as being full-white, and that I have toned down that white to be a bit darker grey color so that it will be easier to paint over. Also if your paint program supports it you could create a new 'layer' on top of the wireframe and paint over that so the opacity of the wireframe will not interfere with your painting.
 
 

So its time to dive in and start painting :)


On the left hand side of the above image you can see the 'base' color from which I started this face.  On the right hand side I've done my first sweep of painting. (The mechanics of painting I will cover in another section of the tutorial, brush settings etc) I've used increasingly lighter tones to create his features, cheeks, chin, brow, nose, etc. Now I've left the left hand side intentionally 'undone' as I intend to 'mirror' the right hand side over once I get it to the proper stage. This saves me work and allows me to put more detail and effort into one side and know that both will look as good as the original when Im done.

When I choose to mirror the face, I did not make a cut straight down the middle. Part of the reason being that I painted his lips on both sides already, as well as his nose, and part of his forehead. These areas allow for him to be slightly non-symetrical (an important part of a human face is that it is not perfectly symetrical) So below please take a look at the selection I cropped out and mirrored (note I used the 'lasso' type of selection tool to get this selection):

This I then pasted onto the original image which gives us the below image:

If you look closely you will notice underneath his left eye near the mouth is the seam of where I pasted his face on. This needs to be touched up. Also from here you would go ahead and add greater detail to the rest of the face, doing each side independently to assure its not perfectly symetrical.

And here below we see a much improved version of the face, with his goatee added in for character:


And finally in the last image of this sequence I've gone through and given him highlights and shading, and some weathering to make him look a bit more realistic:

Now you've just seen in a few steps the creation of a face. Part of the techniques used here will be relatively simple for you to pick up, like mirroring. Other techniques will be more difficult. How do you create the shading for his cheeks? How do you create the wrinkles in his forehead?  These are items that its not readily easy to portray to you. Even if I made a 'stroke by stroke' screen capture for you, parts of it will still be unportrayable to you. As well as I have a mechanics of painting section to this tutorial that while it does not focus on faces will at least give you some techniques to use for shading, highlighting, etc and does not need to be repeated here.

Instead of taking that focus I've provided the images and description above , as well as here a check list for realism and quality for you to compare against when you create a face:
 

To achieve the above list you may have to practice and work on your face for some time. But when you are done if you've been able to critique your face for the above points, and either answer then in a positive fashion, or make improvements to bring them close to answering them positively you should have a considerably better face than when you started.  Each face you do should become better by a small margin untill one day you find yourself suprised at how good your getting at it.
 

Carl "slaine' Kidwell
melkior@usa.net