#pleaaaaaaaaaase do research

[orokay]

Hello, orokay!! I've adored your art for years now and I was wondering if you have any tips on how to draw and paint/render scars? I can never seem to get them to look right, any help is appreciated! Hope you're having a good year!

Hi anon, thank you so much!

Sorry this took a minute to reply to, I've been trying to figure out how I wanted to respond. For me, a lot of questions about how I do certain things are kind of tricky bc generally the answer is 'idk I just try things and tweak it until it feels right' and I don't really feel qualified to give art advice bc most of the time I'm just making stuff up as I go, but I know that's not really a helpful answer 😭

My art style tends to lean towards simple and stylized, so for scars I try to limit them to three colors at most, less if I feel like I can get away with it. It also depends a lot on the scar since there are different types of scars. Usually how I pick the colors I use is: one color darker than than the skin tone (shading), one slightly lighter than the skin tone for the injured flesh and occasionally an even lighter color for highlights. I'll include some examples under the cut. But please please please keep in mind wrt scars 99.9% of the time I'm just winging it and going off of what I think looks cool, I don't know anything about the science behind how people scar so please do your own research if you want to be accurate.

I'd say when approaching/researching scars you need to consider a few things:

Skin color of the person- Scars look different on different skin colors and different people scar differently. I think this is one of the biggest things to remember! Color pick for the scar based off of the character's skin tone and shade. The color you use for scar tissue on a person w/ light skin is going to look unrealistic and out of place on person with dark skin, doubly so if the undertone of their skin is different (ie. warm vs neutral vs cool undertones). It's so important to look up references because everyone scars differently and skin type can make a huge difference on how a person scars.

Color of the person's blood- same vibe as with blushing/lip color/etc. if your character has blue blood, the scar likely isn't going to be pink. This probably isn't something you're going to have to keep in mind a lot, but just in case. This also kind of ties into the first one because if a character has a non-human skin tone, like blue, and red blood then the scar is probably going to be more of a purple tone, for example.

Type of scar- think about the injury and what kind of scar would result from it. I'm not a doctor so idk how scarring works and generally go off of vibes, but if you want to make it as accurate as possible, I'd suggest looking up images of scars from whatever type of injury you want your character to have. I used to work with dogs and I scar easily so I have a lot of bite/scratch scars. Some of them are lighter than my skin and raised while others that were less deep are darker and on the surface of the skin (aka no texture). My brother has a very deep dog bite scar that's left a dent in his skin and light, pink and shiny scar tissue. Basically, if you know you have the stomach for it, I 100% suggest looking up examples of the type of injury you're thinking of so you can see how that injury tends to scar. Is it hypertrophic? Atrophic? Keloid?

How was it treated and how old is the scar?- is it a burn scar that received skin grafts? is it a surgical scar? stitches? did it heal well or was there infection? All of these things can change how a wound heals and scars. New scars are going to be much more stark, especially if they're still healing, and most scars fade over time. Examples under the cut...

Some examples from my drawings over the years:

OC w/ healed burn w/ skin graft stylized and very simplified // really simple, sketchy scars on Narci:

This iteration of Blue's blood is green so the scar on her cheek is green (we're going to ignore her lips and the flush on her ears lol):

raised scars on nikora and blair's cheeks: