How to Make Accurate Melanin Drenched Skin Tones for Paintings
“Paletting” melanin skin tones will be difficult at first but it’s not impossible and the more you paint the easier it’ll get.
The reason you might feel frustration when approached with blending/painting skin tones properly is because you’re not considering a few things:
1. How light/dark affects the skin’s range of values
2. The “tone” of the hue…is it warm or cool?
Look at the image featured for insight into how to think about creating a range of values.
These 2 elements are what I’m going to focus on for this post because I have easy solutions.
1. Recognizing the values of your subject’s skin tone is contingent on how the light falls on them.
A good reference photo for a mature painting will not be totally lit. There will be shadows and darker areas which is important because it’ll add depth to your painting.
For those areas that are lighter, know that your range of values needs to go up in scale.
I always like to use the rule of finding 3 values in a skin tone- darkest to lightest.
For the darker areas, think the opposite.
It is impossible for you to be lit in a room filled with darkness, so don’t paint this way. It’s the quickest way to make your paintings look immature.
2. The “tone” of your skin tones may be warm or cool
As brown tinted people, understand that there are tones that make us unique. They may be cool or warm. A “Cool” brown tone is based on the cool color scale, blues, greens, indigos and of course Warm brown tones based on oranges and reds.
Now by no means am I suggesting to use these colors as your PRIMARY paint option. What I AM suggesting is to mix them in slightly, subtly with colors like Burnt Sienna, Raw Umbers, Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber < my go to choices for mixing down skin tones in Oil or Acrylic.
Want me to demo all of this above?
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