Making Cleavage on skin template. Drawing Cleavage?

[Candi Renfew]

Ok , so i see skins with Drawn Cleavage or Possibly photosourced Cleavage on a skin template , uploaded in sl and made as a cleavage exchancer or option on skins. How exactly do i draw cleavage? any tips? and mabey on a Eloh Template? i noticed Eloh doesnt have a Cleavage option thats close together. For example Esuga skin cleavage . I want to learn how to make cleavage on the template. Instead of the Appearence menu.

[SpicyKittie]

I know how to do this

 

You can IM in world if you like: Zuri Simca

 

I can try to help you understand how they do it.

[Jenna Lierfatte]

hi..i'm interested to learn how to draw a skin cleavge..help me pleaseee!:matte-motes-bashful:

[Chosen Few]

I'll give you the same answer for this that I give for any and every "How to I draw/paint ______________" question:  Take an art class.

If I handed you pencil and paper, and asked you to draw a woman with nice cleavage, would you be able to do it?  If the answer is no, then chances are you won't be able to do it in the computer either.  It's the exact same skill after all, just a slightly different tool set.  Being a digital artist is 99.999% about being an artist, and 0.0001% about having technical expertise.

As much as I love discussion forums, and the SL content forums in particular, the fact of the matter is it's pretty hard to give art lessons in writing.  If you had a technical question like "How do I make an alpha channel?" or "What's a good method in Photoshop for applying weathering effects to this wooden table I just made?" we could give you any number of highly informative step-by-step written tutorials to follow, and you'd have all the information you need to become as technically proficient as anyone else here.  But obviously, those kinds of questions aren't about aesthetic sensibility or artistry.  They're strictly about button-pushing.

A question like "How do I paint cleavage?" is all about developing your skill as an artist.  There's no magical "make it look good" button in Photoshop.  You're going to have to become a painter, if you're not one already.

Hopefully this will help get you started.  I'll share with you the advice my favorite art teacher in college used to give.  Almost every class, he would repeat these words, "Approach every subject as a problem of light and shadow, and you'll never go wrong."  In other words, don't think of it as "How do I draw cleavage?"  Instead, think about how do light and shadow fall across cleavage.  What do the shadows look like?  What do the highlights look like?

The real answer to "How do I draw cleavage?" is you can't.  Even for the greatest artist in the world, no amount of applying pencil to paper or applying coloration to on-screen pixels is going to magically cause a pair of breasts to spring into existence out of thin air.  What you CAN do is draw the shading that cleavage produces.  That's easy.

So what are the relevant properties of cleavage we need to consider, and how do those properties affect the behavior of light and shadow? 

• Well, first of all, breasts are round, which means light and shadow will grade around them.  Obviously, flat shading won't do.
• Second, breasts come in pairs.  Put any two objects in close proximity, and less will light escape from in between them than from around them.  Hilltops are sunnier than hillsides, if you know what I mean.
• Unless the breasts are totally squeezed together, the sternum area in between them will be visible.  Unlike the breast surfaces immediately to either side of it, which face each other, the sternum itself faces forward, so it reflects light straight out.  Hence it appears more brightly lit than the inner cleavage area of each breast.  It's often just as bright as the most forward-facing parts of the breasts themselves.
• The whole thing is covered in skin, which is partially translucent, very slightly shiny, and somewhat diffuse.  Light and shadow behave differently on skin than on fabric or metal or wood, etc.
• The particular skin of the chest area on females tends to be wrinkle-free, even on the elderly.  Thus thin spindly highlights and shadows will look unnatural.  You want wide, sweeping highlights and carefully graded shadows.
• Remember, it's not just about the breasts.  The flesh of the upper chest and along the sternum is among the thinnest in the entire body (only the forehead and shins are thinner), which means underlying bone structure tends to be visible, even on the obese.  Also, breasts sit on top of pectoral muscles, and although most people don't tend to realize it, the pecs play a huge role in defining the cleavage.  Many trained artists, when drawing a woman, will actually draw the pecs first, and then draw the breasts right on top of them afterward.

With all that in mind, take a really good look at the light and shadow on some real cleavage, and draw what you see.  A live model would be best, if you have someone around who's willing to let you stare at her chest for a while.  If not, a photograph will do.  Pay close attention to the nuances of the lighting and the shading, as they fall across the subject, and reproduce the same on your canvas.

It'll take practice to get good at it, of course.  Just keep at it.  Drawing is a skill every human being can learn to do well.  Some people stumble across it on their own at a young age, and we label them "artists" early on, but they're certainly not the only ones who can do it.  Everybody can, literally everyone.  If we couldn't, we also wouldn't be able to watch movies or see identify objects in photographs and paintings.  It's all the same brain function.

 

As for what tools to use in Photoshop for this, whenever it comes to highlighting and shading, the burn & dodge tools are your friends.  After you lay down your base skin texture, use the burn & dodge tools (on an overlay layer) to shade the roundness of the breasts.  Bam, you've got cleavage.  Finish fleshing it out by also shading underlying shapes of the rib cage, the collar bones, the pectoral muscles, etc.

But let me reiterate, the tools alone aren't going to make it look right.  For that, YOU need to know what to paint with them.  And for that, YOU need to have done your homework as an artist.

 

I hope this has been helpful.  As I said, it's pretty hard to try to teach any of this with just words.  Good luck, and have fun.

[Candi Renfew]

Thanks!

I look at the Eloh Eliot templates as sort of a guideline....

And shadows was the problem that i had...!