How to Paint Pale Skin Tones
Learning how to paint realistic-looking skin tones will breathe life into your artwork. One of the most difficult aspects of learning how to paint in any medium, but particularly in oil or acrylic portrait painting, is mastering mixing techniques to get a skin tone that matches that of your subject. Particularly when painting pale skin tones, the technique can be difficult, since less pigment is used. Start with these basic techniques and take notes along the way so that you can remember exactly which pigment combination you used to achieve an ideal pale-flesh tone.
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Things You'll Need
- Oil, acrylic or watercolor paints (yellow ochre, red vermillion, ultramarine blue, burnt umber and raw umber)
- Palette
- Brushes
Instructions
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1
Understand that painting skin requires capturing the colors it reflects. Consider your subject's background and begin with that color in your flesh tone mix. For example, if your subject is wearing a navy suit or is laying on a periwinkle bed, start with a hint of navy or periwinkle on your pallet to mix into larger amounts of your subject's skin. Reserve a portion of this mixed, darker hue to paint shadows on your subject's skin. Remember that shadows are darkest in the area closest to the light source, and they lighten as they stretch away from the source.
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2
Start with a base tone that you mix yourself when painting pale skin tones. Place a daub of yellow ochre paint on your pallet. Lay a little daub of vermilion next to it on the left. Create an orange mix of the two below. Place a daub of ultramarine blue to the right of the mixed orange. Bring some of the orange below and add a bit of the blue to it. Place a daub of white off to the right of the darker, mixed orange. Mix the two into a lighter flesh base beneath the darker orange. Keep the base skin tone mixture to the bottom-left of your pallet.
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3
Create a range of red and yellow skin tones on the upper-right of your pallet. Repeat Step 2, but add varying levels of yellow ochre and vermillion to achieve different hues of your base color that you can use to complement in shadows throughout your subject's base.
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4
Mix a range of gray paint hues on the bottom-right of your pallet. Realize that grays reduces the brilliance in your painting and keeps your subject from appearing unnaturally vibrant as if she had just come out of a bad experience at a tanning salon. Start with a daub of one of your red skin tones. Create two lines of paint hues by adding varying amounts of burnt umber to the base, so that you form a top row of about eight shades and raw umber to the base, forming a bottom row of about eight shades.
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5
Observe the lighting and appearance of your subject, and experiment with your range of light skin hues to achieve the delicate balance reflected in your subject.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit paint brushes image by Horticulture from Fotolia.com
