How to Paint Skin Tones in a Portrait: Subject 2

Video Transcript

"Now for our second subject skin tone, we're going to take some of our nice medium yellow, we're going to add in a good portion of white. We're going to pale this out, first pale it out and we're also going to add in a little bit of sap green, until you start getting a nice greenish tone here. If you see that the yellow is too strong, don't hesitate to bring in some more white, to pale it down. We don't want this to be a strong yellow, by any means, more of like a sickly yellow. Basically the type of yellow you might see at the hospital, if somebody's really, if they're not doing too well. As soon as we mix this up, we're going to start applying this on our subject. Same drill as before. We're going to be applying this layer over the whole face and you're going to start thinking "oh my goodness graces, we have blue, we have, we have red." This painting is looking all over the place, well that's often times what happens, in your base layers. They won't be as unified as they will become, later on. You'll have different layers you'll be putting on here, which is going to unify the painting, very nicely. First things first, we need to get our base layers down, which we'll do up over here, over our subjects eyes, over everything, at this point. Bring the coloration down over the lips and the teeth. You could always paint it white later, we want covered canvas, that's what we want right now, that's what's on the agenda. Make sure you don't miss the ear, very easy to do. Bring this pigment down and over into the paint, all the way down here into the V-neck. Everything is covered. If you find yourself saying "well that looks ok but that's still a little too strong a yellow." All you have to do is take some medium and some white, bring it in here and see right away it's going to start paling more. So again, never think of it as a one shot deal. The oil paints I'm using today are excellent at being able to be modified both now and also into the future, as they take days to dry. Something we can do, with subject two, is add in black hair. Now you're going to have to be careful to make sure that you're keeping with the basic shape of the black. See how I'm leaving a little bit of white here? That's providing a guide map, there's going to be, again like the rest of this, a black under layer but there's going to be other colors going on here so I don't want to loose totally the map I've already drawn for myself. Either that or if you're fine loosing the map, make sure you have continued access, to the photograph the painting is based off of. What we're going to do is, we're going to expand this out, initially using a flat head brush and then after we're done with that, when we want to go down to the more details, I suggest using a smaller round, to finish it out, so we're not like blotching over the yellow."