a little study i did to try to depict Essek looking as realistic (within my style) as possible. you can tell i was serious by the fact that i blacked out his clothes so as not to get distracted from the task at hand /j
i encounter a few persistent issues when i draw Essek; it’s not only in him not being a real person that i can’t look at to then draw accurately as far as his facial features are concerned, but also in the fact that purple people don’t exist. i can’t study, from pictures or real life, how skin of that color would behave in different lighting, how the blood vessels would appear from underneath it, what shade the sebum would highlight the nose and forehead with, and on and on and on. i can only make an educated guess, and it takes a lot of mental math each time 🤭 so here i tried paying special attention to the realism of it all, to see if i’ll learn something! my art is somewhat (semi-)realistic as is, but there still is a fair amount of stylizing going on, and i wanted to have a bit of fun figuring out where it happens. so far noticed that i tend to exaggerate facial features and make them larger than they would probably be on a real person (noses and eyes in particular), and my art could benefit from more different hues when i’m doing skin, especially green.
So the traditional logic for faces is the yellow, red, and blue zones, yeah? Yellow for forehead, red for nose and cheeks, blue for mouth and jaw.
I remember reading one of my textbooks—probably Gurney’s Color and Light—and he explained that it was because the forehead has bone really close to the surface, the cheeks/nose/ears have a ton of blood vessels, and the jaw has a ton of hair follicles, which, for darker hair, creates a bluish cast!
I also remember my art teacher putting on the DVD extras for the 3D Smurf film, playing an interview/BTS thing from the modelers and animators where they talked about what color of blood Smurfs have. Going by Smurf logic, you’d expect blue, right? Everything they eat is blue, they are blue, To Smurf is To Blue. But apparently, when they rendered that with all the subsurface scattering and the slight translucence that comes from skin, the blue blood looked super creepy and off-putting, so they ended up changing it back to red, and that looked right.
I read a fic recently (I know it’s called zweifacher, but I can’t recall the fic writer at this exact second), where one of the author’s notes mentioned that they were treating drow like silkie chickens, with hyperpigmentation, so their blood was almost black, their muscles and bones were black—not teeth though, because teeth aren’t bones??? madness— and that just seemed really cool to me.
So I guess all these thoughts coalesce into a series of questions:
Are your drow capable of growing facial hair?
If not, are they like children where they just have very fine hair that doesn’t grow very long or thick, or are they like, alopecia-smooth except for scalp and eyebrows?
What effect does white or very pale hair have on the skin when it is shaved smooth?
What color is your drow blood?
Does the color of your drow skin influence the color of their organs/muscles/etc?
Something that might be a super useful tool would be like, a flesh orb or something. Make a sphere in Blender or something, and give it material settings so that you could individually set the local color of like, skin, muscle, blood, hair, and bone, and then have a couple rendering presets for lighting scenarios, and then you’d be able to mess around with the colors to find the look you want, and then boom you have your skin tone reference.
Dang it, now I really want one of those, why can’t I just be magically better at Blender
i kid you not this is exactly my thought process! i headcanon that drow have dark purple/almost black blood (which influences the color of the blush, subsurface scattering, veins, lips and mucous membranes), no robust facial hair but hair follicles present at the unnoticeable peach fuzz level (which influences the jaw and the area around the mouth), white bones (which lend slightly yellow-ish cast to areas of skin that stretch close to the bone), and so on and so forth. i’ve even been working on an Essek 3d sculpt in Blender in the hopes that i’ll be able to figure out how to paint it and then stick it into environments for on-demand color references 😂 (it’s slow-going because i’m a Blender novice)
ALT
ALT