These are made from scratch. Altering photographs is referred to as "photo manipulation," of which I have only a little bit of experience. Painting in photoshop is simple enough, but takes a lot of practice - just scan a sketch, or draw it directly into photoshop, create a new layer underneath the sketch, add base colours in various areas (flat peach/brown under skin, etc), and then create a new layer on top of the sketch and bases, and add your shadows and hilights and tone variations.

There are countless tutorials on the net that can get you started in understanding the steps better, but once you get the hang of it, it's all practice from there.

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Small, brown, moderately hairy, lightly spiced. Just how mom used to make e'm.

Creator of Anathema Online, a hand-coded text-based world built from scratch specifically to cater to freeform roleplayers, with features galore to bring a sense of tangibility and realism to the glorious genre spawned from the age-old tradition of descriptive literature.