Tips for making texture

I am interested to make asset like old school game such as half-life, cs, tomb raider, resident evil and many more. But I am bad at drawing especially picking some color detail for skin. ex: https://www.textures-resource.com/playstation/residentevildirectorscut/texture/304/

So far I can is fill a whole surface with single color (tiled) and I realized skin doesn't work like that, skin has some pattern that makes every single spot darker or brighter. some things also look like in folds of clothes, I tried with dodge/burn tool and this doesn't look good. In short, I can't pick color pattern to make it look realistic.
So I need advise about detailing technique.

thank you.

 

Making good looking art is not easy, just like coding, it takes years of practice to get good at it.

But you did one important thing already correctly, which is to observe what is in a well made texture. Another thing is to check real-world reference, as looking at other people's work is not going to improve your color/shape eye. But since you are doing old school textures, it's better to bias more towards imitating the used style, colors etc.

To get a quick level-up with colors, you could go pick up a pixel art color palette from web (I know, you're not exactly doing pixel art but please read on). I think it's better to pick a palette that has less colors than more, so that you start to understand better which colors could be used (and why) to certain areas. Some 32-color palette might work fine for you. You can start blocking your textures with the palette, as you will then already get some retro feel from that limited palette. Pick a palette for which the author has explained the intended use-cases. Some might be biased towards fantasy enviroments, some to sci-fi metal and some to skin tones and so on.

One way to get decent results is to imitate the limitations of the device. Go study the specs what the devices had and you get a few ideas why the things looked like they did.

You could also use color quantization to produce stylized/retro-looking textures from more realistic looking ones, then you will get a similar look that many games of that era had. You can do that in Photoshop and many other apps that support converting images to a predefined palette. You could then continue manually working on these textures. This might work fine for things like walls, rocky surfaces etc.

And it's possible to search for old tutorials, there might still be some old character skin tutorials over at Polycount. I would also go check some basic digital painting tutorials that explain some things about colors.

And about that skin - abandon the RGB color picker in your paint app and have a HSV (hue,saturation,value) picker visible, so that you can easily adjust hue/saturation of the color you are going to use for skin shading etc. You can search for how to paint skin and that will find you many videos and articles.

 

Thank you, yes I had studied colors. I checked gordon freeman from half-life 1 and he has darker point and between them the pixel looks like spray effect from ms.paint (some people called it stencil but I am not sure).

and I was following old tutorial from Chumbalum soft - milkshape 3D 8 years ago (I started learn 3d since 2011 and this is not routine because I was a student that day) cs girl tutorial on here: http://www.milkshape3d.com/ms3d/tutorials.html (the site that contains tutorial has been down, I still tracking cached server)

I still remember how they made, they cross out some spots with brighter colors and provide a burn tool in photoshop, that day my result was very bad.

 

@RxGian
So how is the texture going?

 

not much improvement, I am not drawing texture everyday. Just in freetime.
I got another advise from someone who works at big studio, they usually using stencil method with real life photo as references.
Here's the tutorial I mentioned above: https://gamebanana.com/tuts/11015

 

@RxGian
Yeah it can be tough sometimes.
Aye cool. I'll check out the tutorial in awhile.