Drawing a custom face part

The generator as it is is a great tool for you to create your own characters, but depending on the size of your cast or what you want to make with it, it might still be too limited.
For me there are several reasons why you might want to make your own facial pieces:

1. you wanna be able to throw together emosets in the generator, therefore a certain range of “emotions” for each character with those eyes or mouth is nice to have
2. you want something specific the generator does not have yet
3. you want to add your own style

I am going to use Gimp and my sturdy old offbrand graphic tablet here. As always when I take out the tablet, you can still do it with a mouse, but the tablet might be more convenient.

1. Build your base

What do I mean? Well, I could just draw a random pair of eyes or a nose, but it has to exist in a certain context, here, the context of: it has to work as a facepart and with the other existing faceparts (otherwise I’d have to redraw everything and given the amount of parts… no thanks).
To do that, you go to your RPG Maker MZ folder, for Steam owners is should be your programs folder and then

and then you pick the parts you need to put together a character that has a face, a basic hairstyle and a complete body.

This is my dummy girl I came up with for this tutorial and I will upscale the whole thing to 1000% (10 times the size) so I have more room to work with and scale the result down at the end.

Now I am going to make custom eyes, a nose and a mouth (all stuff that would not show up in SV and TV, as we focus on the face today) and explain how you can do the same.
Remember that I cannot teach you to draw in just a few words here, a lot of things just require practice and references.

1. Draw the stuff

Eyes:
To be easier to recolor, eyes come in two parts, the base with leashes, wrinkles and eyelashes

and just the iris.

That is important to keep in mind when working on your personal eyes, as it is much easier to draw them on two layers then having to separate them later!
As for everything, knowing what you want is key, because otherwise you might end up with … something, but maybe not exactly what you need.
So I want: eyes with leashes, something for a cute, nice and beautiful character who knows what she wants. Still, they should look like they belong to a grown up woman.
So I take my “canvas” and set the front hair semi transparent (and the eyes layer invisible, so they don’t distract me), so it does not block my vision…

and then, I sketch out my eyes:

I can still use the default eyes as a check, whether mine are sizewise and positionwise working:

There we go!
Now, I like to create the layer with the lashes and so first, as the iris has to fit onto it. Especially for the lashes I also like to use a brush with pressure sensitivity in regards of the size:

And well, I already had my sketch, now I simply draw the proper lineart on a separate layer, I have all the time in the world to go over it until I like it:

Then I make the default layer of the eyes visible and move it next to the area where I work on my part to have it as reference and create an extra layer for the “behind:”

I fill it in with solid white…

…and use a soft brush with the purple I picked from my reference for that gradient.

Then, after removing the excess, I can merge the layers and that part is already done!


Another new layer, another moved reference layer, eyes part two!

Again, I like to utilize a solid colored area as base:

I give that layer a layer mask though, so I can only paint “within” the white. If you are not comfortable with layer masks, you could just use an eraser in the end to trim off the exess!


Then, with my reference above, I try to emulate the shading style, by drawing in lighter circles in the middle and light curves below them:

I add the pupil and feathered out the curve a little…

…expanded on the shading with a soft brush and the next lighter color…

…and with the lightest color I picked from my reference:

After adding the light dots in about the same areas as the reference…

…and removing my sketch…

I scale down my eyes to see if I like them in their “original” size:

Well, the lashes were a little to tiny for me, so I quickly revamped them:


I keep those two final eye layers, we will have a look on the export later!

Nose:
For the nose I tried something less anime-ish here, again, I need to know what I want!
So, something a bit more realistic, not a perfectly cutsey nose, but nothing bad. Something straight, larger than default.
And here is my sketch:

This time I pulled in a different reference than what my “base” had, as I needed something with more shading, so the nose on the left on the image above is changed out:

The process itself is similar to the one of the eyes. First comes the lineart…

…then some shading with my reference on the side, knowing that the shadows are at the bottom and a little at the right…

...and my highlights on the top and the left…

…and some final touching according to my personal taste!

Scaled down as test and I decided I like it!


Mouth:
The mouth again can have multiple layers, so here I wanted to make one to show them. A simple female mouth with soft lips and slightly opened to show the vampire fangs. I start as usual with my sketch…

… but for the lineart I have to keep in mind that my upper layer will be recolored with the skin and that my lower mouth layer will have the teeth and tongue and so on. That means, my teeth are not on this layer and I need exactly teeth shaped holes in it!

So on a separate layer the lines for those are added:

For the shading the same applies, I shade my upper layer with a teeth shaped hole in it. My light still comes from the left and top and I pick my colors from other mouths for maximal match!

Some teeth shading and…

… woops, way too small, details get lost. Now you see why drawing on a 10x the original scale is so great.

I simply scaled my two mouth layers up by 150% and remodeled it a little and there we go!


And now up to…

1. Export

Here we have my 3 brand new parts on 5 layers:

I personally find that they blend in better after scaling down if I blur them out a little to match the other upscaled parts, so I go over them with a gaussian blur:


And here is what it would look like in the end:

Now I have to export all my parts into the face folder, therefore I look at what the highest part number for that part is, look for a part of the same type, copy the name and adjust the number to the one my new part has. I will export them all from the same file, just making sure only that one layer I wanna export is visible. So mouth 26 becomes the two parts:


And here you can see what my 5 parts ended up as

Then you need the variation files, here are the bases you might want to use (no need to credit me for those):

Then you pick the base you need, drop you parts onto it, move it to the right place and add your name:

I swear to you, the name part or at least a hint who made it is crucial. So many people drop stuff into their folders and forget who made them and not being able to use them anymore as they don’t know who to credit and under which terms they go. So save yourself and anyone using the part of the struggle and leave your name, since the variation only shows up in the selection area, the resulting char is not affected by that!
And there we go, my parts work fine together…

…with my older mouth…

…and mixed with that older nose of mine!


I am not perfect at drawing parts, but I thought I might share how I make them. Probably there are ways to streamline it or just draw better than I do. Besides the struggle to set them up which can be a bit annoying, you should try it out and see if you can give your characters your own extra touch!