Flesh tint in oil

[Chris Saper]

My appraoch to mixing skin tones is perhaps divergent from yours, but may be one you would find helpful.

I do not believe that a painter can be formulaic about skin color; I do, however, think that one can be sytematic, and develop an approach which works across a variety of media and diverse skin color."Painting Beautiful Skin Tones with Color & Light" deals entirely with how one might answer this question...I'll try to briefly summarize the decision-making approach.

I mix skin color by making two fundamental decisions: First, what is the local color of a particular subject's skin? Second, what factors are modifying the local color?

Local skin color consists of three things:

1. Hue. All skin color contains some aspect of orange. Decide where on the red-yellow continuum your suject's skin hue lies.

2. Value. Determine the average value of your subject's skin.

3. Saturation. Decide how greyed-down your subject's skin color is, and whether is it neutralized with blues, greens or violets.

Local color will be mdified by a number of factors, like adjacent or reflected colors, but nothing is a more powerful modifier,in my view, than the color of light on your subject. The color of light drives skin color in light as well as in shadow, and they are different colors, rather than lighter or darker versions of local color.

Whenever you mix two different hues together, the resulting color is different in temperature than either of the original colors...including white and black, which can be very strong cooling influences. So every time I add a new color to a mixture, I check the temperature of the new color to see if it needs to be adjusted.

I note from your question that your palette includes several earth tones. As my standard palette does not contain earth tones (only 6-7 tube colors plus black and white) I could not offer advice about their use. I think every painter selects the size and components of his or her own palette based on a variety of things, including philosophy, personal sense of color, temperment, and how each was taught. I think though, whatever your view, that you can apply this approach,and see if it is useful to you.

Best Wishes