Art lessons - learn about skin-coloring in portrait painting
7-2 SKIN COLORS OR FLESH TONES
I wrote this lesson in response to a number of letters - to quote but one;
'Some people have difficulty mixing what are called "skin colours." I have seen portraits where no flesh tones
were used at all (somewhat like the dutch painter example in your lesson). How do you actually decide what
values and hues you will use for a certain person's skin tones? Do you think "cool" and "warm" colours? Do you
decide the hue based on the shadowed colours or the colours in the light, or perhaps you use some other
method?'My Reply; The meat of a cooked crab is a delicacy but the environment of the crab itself, and its food, are quite
too revolting to contemplate ... which brings me to the skin color or flesh tones of the pale-skinned European
and the pallet most suitable for their rendition.
My guide is this: 'find the nearest color matches to the bodily fluids, add the hues of arterial and congealed
blood, and the blue of a good deep bruise, line them up carefully and you will have a pallet suitable for the
finest of skins'.
Without being too specific yellow ochre, raw and burnt umber, light red, rose madder, cobalt blue and white
seem to work well enough. Sometimes a transparent yellow and naples yellow can also be useful. Strangely, this
pallet also seems sufficient for African and Asian skin colors.Painting skin color, throughout history, has been more an exercise in fashion rather than anything else. Today
the brown suntanned flesh is attractive to the northern races while the pallid sun-shy color seems desirable
among darker skinned people. This may derive as much from envy or our fashion industry as from anything
else. For sexual allure the rounded shapes that denote health and vitality are probably far more powerful than
the hue - and if they come in pairs even more so.I learned a lot by trying to paint people of various races, and by discerning the similarities as well as the
differences. The first thing I learned was that there is no such thing as a formula for skin color. Skin has texture
and this can alter if it is wet or dry, male or female, old or young. Skin, glistening under an oily sweat - as say
with a 'black' body-builder - could create a totally different look than the skin of a 'white' Scottish damsel
reclining under an umbrella in a summer country garden. How do we discriminate? Texture is a product of edge
definition and sharpness of the reflected light (see lesson on texture).
Whereas the body-builder may create forms like polished ebony the skin on the damsel may well be bonehttp://www.geocities.com/~jlhagan/lessons/skin_color.htm (1 of 4)1/13/2004 3:54:31 AM