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Without wanting to get into a skin-tones thread, put some Indian Red, Light Red, Yellow Ochre, Naples Yellow, a tiny bit of raw umber and viridian, and the white of your choice (not titanium, though, for portraits), and play with those pigments a little while. You should be able to mix dozens of flesh tones from those alone. Then you can add other dashes -- lemon yellow, Venetian Red, even Burnt Umber -- as you need them.
Keep your palette limited early on. I happen to hate golf (for a lot of reasons), but it's kind of the same deal. The other day I was doing the whole "50 Ways to Lose Your Golf Ball" routine (sorry, Paul), and I finally settled down and took out the hearing aids (they seem to affect my balance on a swing) and thought, "If I bring the squared club face back to the ball on the same line that I used to trace my backswing, 'they will come'." And that's all I thought about, on every swing. And wow, how it worked. I only sliced into the trees on every other swing.
Sometimes we get overwhelmed here, too. We reapproach our works with advices about values and edges and chroma and composition, and we hit the ball right into the sand.
Pick out one thing. Get it right. Get feedback. Pick out another thing. Work on that next. Do this all your life.
"Easy as cake!!!" my Mandarin Chinese tutor used to say. (Pie isn't much found in Taiwan. Moon Cakes, though, were ubiquitous and culturally important. Perhaps that's what she meant, after all.)
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