Now it's time to start painting, so bring out your Wacom pad or other digital pen. If you don't have a pen, then you have to set the opacity of your brush to very low and slowly build up the colours.

What I usually do is, I almost always use the Flow setting of the brush rather than Opacity. When you want to use the opacity/flow settings you have to check "Other Dynamics" and choose Pen Pressure. 0% is for an even result when painting.

For this test I have used a custom irregular brush with semihard edges.

The difference is, as you can see, that when you set the opacity to a lower setting then you can't get the colour to be any stronger than the opacity setting you have set. Sometimes this can be good of course.

The Flow setting, the lower the setting the softer result you will get. There's less colour in each stroke.

Using both Opacity and Flow will also get very good results. If you're new to Photoshop I recommend that you experiment with different brushes and different settings.

You can also change the softness/hardness (firmness) settings on your Wacom pad. I have an old Ultra Pad and I know that on the newer ones there are quite a few settings. As there are so many different digital pens and pads, I won't go into those settings. But for best results and a good workflow which suits you, I recommend you get to know those settings.

Back to our texture:

Create a new layer for each colour that you will use, let the two base skin layers be on top of all layers, except the one with the UV-layout.

Now pick a semihard irregular brush, make it quite big and work with a low opacity/flow setting.

Remember to activate the correct layer (by clicking on it in the layers palette) each time you change colour. This way it will be easier to change the opacity setting of the layer or the layer mode, erase parts of one colour or change the colour entirely.

Remember when you're painting, this is a human face with irregularities, assymetry and imperfections. And this is the color map, no shininess or shadows.

We will add some freckles, birthmarks and other marks.

Use big custom brushes to click-paint and then click-erase a lot of what you have painted. Vary the sizes of the brushes.

Use different colours, different layer modes (multiply, darken), lower the layer opacity settings. You only want a little of these marks, but it all depends on the character you are making the texture for.

Be careful not to make the character look dirty, unless that's the intention.

Add some more birthmarks by painting them with a semisoft irregular brush(orange/brown) and a hard brush (darker brown).