Matching conflicting Skin Tones

Okay, so, I previously did an article whereby I showed how to make a face from scratch (my third most viewed article). 

It wasn't the best quality work out there but I'd been trying for a while and I managed to do it, on my own and as a nice little proof of concept. What you didn't see, was that I had been trying to add those custom heads to other bodies (call me Dr. Frankenstein) and I was having a lot of trouble, mostly with matching conflicting skin tones.

Then I found a way.

How to do it

Once you've erased the previous head and dragged the new head onto your body, match the colours as best you can and desaturate, all using curves. You don't have to get it 100% though, and obviously this works best if your body is lighter than your face. Then add a multiply layer. Duplicate this layer until the image gets really dark, then pull back the percentage of the last layer. It must be really dark. So much so that you can barely make out any details.

When you get to that level, make an image from what's visible, then invert the image (it should turn blue) and export to a png. Open the new png in Inkscape and select 'Blend Opposites', and this will flip the colour back but it will be a bit on the dark side (I think - my laptop since got broken and I had to sell it; either way there'll be a problem). 

Don't worry about this, it's dead simple to fix. Staying in Inkscape, simply duplicate the layer and change the layer type to 'Exclusion'.

Problems

As you might imagine, you can go from a slight orangeish hue to a light skinned version of your character quite easily. But if you were to try to make a darker or more ethnic character, well... that's quite a bit harder. I never actually practically managed to solve that problem, but recently I've had some insights on how one might be able to do such a thing. 

So I'm going to save that for a later post. as well as a post about some 3D work I did to try to expand my portfolio.