HOW TO FORM THE SKIN COLOR
In this article, I’m going to show you the step by step to perform the color mixing for fair skin with their respective highlights and shadows.
I will also reveal the system I use to make the color always look and feel real and avoid working with a tone that can ruin your work.
My most important recommendation for mixing oil colors is to rehearse a lot before making the final painting, we can separate a specific space of our canvas or surface to practice the tones we want to obtain.
In this way, before executing our painting, we will have a range of colors obtained from several combinations, ready to be used in our work.
But before that, we must know how to achieve the mixture.
In order to achieve the exact tone, I advise you to add the paint a little at a time, not abruptly. What we achieve with this system is that we will see the color change progressively.
At first glance, it may seem like a slow system, but believe me, it is more effective and accurate than you imagine.
The first thing we are going to do is to prepare the base mixture. We start by adding a considerable amount of titanium white and Naples yellow.
We continue with a little yellow ochre.
A pinch of red (be careful because red stains a lot).
Toasted sienna earth and a touch of cerulean blue or whatever blue you have to remove the saturation.
This mixture will be useful for the parts with more light.
We prepare an abundant mixture to be able to cover the whole base.
The result I am looking for is skin that is not so yellow, that is why I am adding white and earth at the same time.
We do a test.
We cover all the mid-tones and highlights. We lighten only with white.
For the shadows, we just added more toasted sienna earth and a touch of blue.
Finally, if we wish to achieve darker, more contrasting shades, we add more tan sienna, cerulean blue, and black.
Be careful with black because it is very strong.
Add oil little by little when mixing.
It is better to go a little at a time, in pinches, before spoiling the mixture.
This simple system will not only work with faces, but with any mixture.
I hope this article has been very useful to you.
We recommend the following post: DOME EFFECT (GRADIENT TECHNIQUE)
