ZBrush Character Creation - Advanced Digital Sculpting 2nd Edition

172 chapter 5 ■ Texture Painting

Painting a Creature Skin

Now that you understand the two methods of painting texture in ZBrush, let’s explore color

theory. This section focuses on painting a creature skin from scratch, but there is often more

to painting than just laying down colors in a random pattern hoping for a good result. By

understanding some basic color theory, you can make educated decisions on what color to

select and where to place it on your character, and you can begin painting extremely realistic

skin textures quickly. For this paint scheme, we’ll use a limited palette. Table 5.4 shows the

colors that we’ll use to paint this particular skin tone.

Table 5.4: Hues used in the paint job

Color Name R G B

Red 255 2 2

Yellow 255 255 128

Blue 0 128 255

Warm brown 64 0 0

Cool brown 72 63 53

Gray 100 123 122

Olive 134 129 89

Color Theory

Color theory constitutes a book unto itself, but some of

the most important things to note are in this section.

The color we see can be organized into a color wheel

(Figure 5.12), which consists of the primary, secondary, and

tertiary colors. Primary colors consist of red, yellow and blue.

These colors cannot be created by mixing any other colors.

The secondary colors are created by mixing two primary col-

ors: red and blue make purple, yellow and blue make green.

Tertiary colors are created by mixing a primary and second-

ary color like blue-green or yellow orange. By understanding

a few color concepts, you can make educated decisions about

what colors to put down on a character when painting a skin.

Temperature

Te mpe rature refers to the relative warmness or coolness of

a color. Red is “warm” compared to blue. A color can be

Figure 5.12 The color wheel