Creating lip textures on Antonia is a lot trickier than I'm used to. The lip UVs are separated from the face. Makes blending a little more difficult, even with painting tools. I generally like to paint and then refine in photoshop but the layers of the lips don't rest directly above the face. Just not used to that kind of set up. So what I've done is taken a seamless skin tile and used it as a pattern in photoshop and flood filled the skin texture in. Then I created some occlusion maps to create some subtle cavity over the skin texture via a multiply. Then I go into Mudbox and 3d paint in variety of detail and fix any seam issues. I'm painting the initial textures standard flesh color so I'll have all those traditional layers to colorize and detail for creature skins, specifically alien skins or whatever. I just started so I haven't even gotten to the detailing yet. Still basically a flood. Despite the difficulty with the lips I think the harshness of the texture transition is mostly due to the topology of the lips rather than the blending, which looks pretty good on the flat files. I think a bit of a smoothing morph to loosen up the tight edge loops around the lips will improve that hard edge, particularly that hard transition around the bottom lip.

The plan is to use a hybrid procedural/image based bump solution. Image based for the lips, brows, and some larger skin details blended with a turbulence for the overall skin... either with a math add or a blender. I've gotten pretty good results using this method for painted textures in the past. For the eyes and brows I already have a bunch of brushes and maps that I've created in the past so those parts will be easy.

I also added a couple of more eye morphs (rotate) and an improved enlarge eyes morph.

Some very initial preview shots...