This tutorial demonstrates how to use digital painting with a drawing tablet to create the illusion of lip gloss on bare lips. I use this technique frequently for retouching, and it’s a great digital painting exercise too!
Final Image Preview
Assets
This photo is from nokomai on stock.xchng. If you’d like to work with the original file, it’s located here. For this tutorial, I’ll be zooming in on the lips to show you the process.
Plumping the Lips
The sheen of lip gloss often gives the impression of plumper lips. To support this illusion, we’ll start by using the Liquify tool (Filter » Liquify). I set my brush size to 195px and select the Bloat tool from the left-hand menu in the dialog window. Then I single-click appoximately five times along the horizontal center of her her lower lip:
The result:
Colorizing the Lips
Colorizing the lips will help them appear moist and as if she is wearing a tinted gloss. I turn on size jitter (refer to my post on digital painting pressure settings if you’re not sure how), select a 30px brush, and pick a light red color (#c83a3a). I create a new layer and roughly paint over the lips.
To blend the color in, I set the Blend Mode for that layer to Soft Light. I also set the layer opacity to 50%.
Finally, I clean up the rough edges with a 100px eraser on 0% hardness. Since the eraser is so large, the edges are very soft—great for subtle blending. I carefully use the soft edge to erase the hard edges of the color. Notice the difference on the far left, far right, and bottom areas of the lips.
Adding Shine
This is the trickiest part!
Before I do anything else, I look at the lips and judge where my light source is. In this case, it appears to be coming from the top left, so I will paint my shine accordingly. If you’re unsure, it’s useful to have reference images.
When light hits a thin coat of lip gloss, it will catch all the little lines in the lips. Our first step is to highlight the more obvious of these lines.
To do so, I set my brush to 5px, white, with size jitter on. I use a series of short, up-and-down strokes to achieve a ‘tapered’ effect. So, for the below stroke, I brush up and down a few times until the middle is the desired thickness, then ‘flick’ my stylus upward so that it will taper on top. I repeat this to taper it on the bottom, too.
With one stroke complete, I proceed to add more strokes. Look for obvious creases in the lips, then place a stroke on the side of it that’s opposite that of your light source.
Next, I begin adding blocks of shine. These will be largest where the light is hitting, then become less obvious as you move away from the light source. I use a consistent up-and-down motion with a light touch to paint these blocks.
As you move away from the light source, the lighting will be less defined. To create a more scattered effect, I just began ‘dotting’ the color instead of painting in strokes.
Here I add some additional sheen on the upper lip. Again, the detail comes from simply ‘dotting’ color and using small, up-and-down strokes.
I reduce the opacity of my shine layer to 80%.
To add an additional reflection from non-direct light, I increase my brush size to 9px and keep the size jitter on. I create a new layer and reduce the opacity to 40%.
In the above image, you can see the natural grooves of the lips as they meet the area where her lips part. These will guide the shape you form.
Using small, circular strokes, I create a shape that is much more general than our first shine. The circular strokes should be most obvious near the grooves in the lips, where small Vs are formed atop the grooves and in-between your circle-strokes. (See image below.) The shape should generally cover any area that you included light, and taper off as it approaches the left and right sides of the mouth.
I use the same technique to add sheen to the top lip.
I reduce the opacity of the layer to 20%.
Final Image
Here’s our final image:
