Oh yeah, layers, good one :) I've been moving away from layer work lately cos of the size of the images I work with, I can't afford too many layers or my computer slows down to a crawl. :( As for veins, I've got a pressure sensitive wacom! Okay, not a solution for everybody ;) Actually, I don't always use the pressure sensitivity, you can do it with brush settings. I upgraded to PS6 so I don't recall what the names for these settings are in PS5, and don't know how to do this in PSP! Which one are you on? Do you have a graphics tablet or using mouse? I select a greyish colour, a tinge of blue depending on how it looks on the skin... trial and error :) Select round brush at 50% hardness, about 5 pixels wide... depending on my working resolution! Then I set the brush size to fade at 50 steps, or is that pixels? I don't know, I just put this number up or down depending on how long I want them to look. You want it longer on the body, not so long on the hands and feet, etc. :) Then do jaggy lines along the body. I don't even pretend to know where veins should be on an anatomically correct skin, I just brush it where there's a boring space that's likely to be visible on a render. No point putting detail on spots not likely to be rendered much... :) I keep putting off telling you about the lips cos I think I'll find time to do a screen cap... I'll never get around to it so here goes... I think I stumbled on an easy way of doing them. :D I basically do the brush work on them, fade set to 20 or something, and put in LOTS of those little vertical creases top and bottom. Okay, normal enough. But then I use the much maligned craquelure filter. (This filter's got as many enemies as the cloud, corner fold, and lens flare effects I believe. I try not to be a filter snob cos they come in handy when used correctly!!! :P) I select the lips area, then apply cracquelure (how the heck do you spell that!) at very low settings! This gives the lips those horizontal creases that never look random enough when I try to do it by hand! vee oh la! ;) Then dodge and burn the lips for uneven blotchyness, especially on guys the uneven colours are common, as well as the expected shadow and highlights (but only so much cos you want the rendering lights to do their work)

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a sweet disorder in the dress kindles in clothes a wantoness,
do more bewitch me than when art is too precise in every part