How to Choose Oil Color Paints for Portraits
Although just about any type or quality of oil paint may be used to paint a portrait, the colors you select will have a significant effect on your finished product. Colors that are chosen at random will most likely detract from the sense of design and quality of your painting. Although you do not need an in-depth understanding of color theory to make good choices, you will need to give your color choices thought before diving in.
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Instructions
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Choose colors that will make sense together when they appear in the finished product. Study your subject, whether you are looking at a photograph or a live person, and mentally begin to categorize the colors that you see in front of you. Are they warm tones? Cool tones? What colors are predominant? What colors would you like to incorporate more into the portrait? Use this mental list as a jumping-off point for choosing the colors that you will start with. Engage in a mental dialogue with yourself. For example, you may choose warm tones with accents of green and blue because they match the eyes of your subject. You may want to change the purple belt around your subject's waist to a shade of emerald because it will add to the flow of the painting, and because purple appears nowhere else in the painting, so it will stand out.
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2
Limit the color choices on your palette now that you have established an organization. Decide what colors can be mixed to make other colors. Try to mix as many colors as you can, rather than using paint directly from the tube. Colors that come straight from the tube have a flatness that will detract from the three-dimensional quality of your portrait. These colors also have a bottled, pre-fab appearance that makes them less interesting than colors that are personally mixed.
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3
Select the appropriate shades for flesh tones. Flesh tones are especially difficult for artists to mix. If your subject has light skin, you will mostly use red, yellow and white, with a small amount of brown and/or blue. For darker skin tones, you will use mostly a mixture of brown, blue, red and yellow, with a small amount of white. Most likely, you will find yourself experimenting a great deal to find the correct proportions.
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Choose the colors you will use for shadows. Using black for the shadows in your portrait will most likely yield muddy, dissatisfying results. Shadows painted with blue, green, purple or even shades of red will add depth and interest to your painting. Choose shadow colors based on your color organization, which you decided upon in step 1.
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Tips & Warnings
Your color choices should have a rhyme and reason and a sense of organization. You do not have to paint every color you see in front of you--pick and choose wisely. Colors that have no place in your portrait--that clash with other colors or seem random--will give your portrait an overall sense of disharmony.
