I've read lots of tutorials about digital painting and one that seems to pop out once in a while is tut on painting certain materials like skin. They seem so unimportant that I don't really try out those tutorials. But after some consideration I did now because I think that is what causing me difficulty:



I tried to paint four materials. From top left to bottom right:

Generic diffuse material: A dull white ball. Lots of tutorials about this one so I don't have that much difficulty.

Shiny material: Yellow plastic ball. A bit like diffuse material but with strong highlights. Lots of tuts too.

Metal: Hope I make a good gold material. What do you think. Not much tut about it and thus bit tricky. Used a golden ring as reference.

Skin: Probably the most difficult. The tuts I read talk about Subsurface scattering (SSS) and Wikipedia talked mumbo jumbo about it. Still I tried to paint the SSS effect, I hope.

In the center is a scaled down version of them to show how it would look at a distance.

That is all. Do you have problems too like me in painting materials? Like to hear tips and advice from all of you GIMPers concerning this.

Good start. The specular highlights might look better round. The gold one needs the most work. If you had a ball of gold it would be reflective with lots of highlights. As an example Run File>New>Create>Logos>SOTA Chrome choose a bold font and then delete the top layer. That's what gold should look like.

Hi Dave: Well, I chose a square highlight because I was thinking of a square light source such as what would come from windows or photography light rigs. From my observation round highlights are somewhat rare, as highlights are reflection of the light source. They take the shape of the light source. If light comes from a window, then they would have the shape of square or rectagle like the windo (unless, the window is round).

As for the gold. While I was painting this, I'm thinking of gold as something reflective like a mirror. That is how my gold ring seems to me. Since the only things to reflect here in my painting is the light source and the gray ground (there are also the other balls too but I ignored them here), then there should only be one highlight (from the light source) any more highlinghts would be unrealistic. I could make more than one highlights but I was not about being creative here (round balls aren't really creative ) but technical . Would follow your advice in the future, for effects, but I think I shall not do it here.

I agree though that I still need practice. You can never get enough of practice. There is always something to learn.

Materials are very hard to paint, especially skin and leather. I ought to do some exercises like this myself. I think you have done a good job.

Love your avatar and sig David

Thank you, Molly.