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How to Make Skin Color – Skin Color Mixing Tutorial
Human skin tones are incredibly variable, so it can be tricky to mix the perfect skin color. If you are a budding portrait artist or just beginning to paint, knowing the basic principles behind mixing skin colors is essential. Once you have mastered skin tones, the painting world is your oyster. Come with us as we guide you through the basic techniques involved in producing a range of flesh tones and give you some tips on painting skin tones successfully.
Table of Contents
- 1 First Things First
- 1.1 Pinpointing Your Ideal Flesh Tone
- 1.2 Bringing Together Your Family of Shades
- 2.1 How to Mix Lighter Skin Tones
- 2.2 How to Mix Medium Skin Tones
- 2.3 How to Mix Darker Skin Tones
- 4.1 Crafting Skin Tones That are hit by or Hidden from Light
- 4.2 Crafting Skin Tones with Blush
- 5.1 How to Make Skin Color with Oil Paints
- 5.2 How to Make Skin Color with Acrylic Paint
- 5.3 Using Watercolor Paints to Make Skin Color
- 6.1 Do Some Color Matching Exercises
- 6.2 Always Consider Your Light Source
- 6.3 Be Very Cautious When Making Your Skin Tones Darker
- 7.1 How do You Make Light Skin Tones?
- 7.2 How to Mix Paint for Skin Tones?
- 7.3 How to Mix Dark Skin Tones?
First Things First
There are a few starting steps that you need to have down before we can move on to explore how to make skin color with paint. What we want to do here is to become oriented within the world of painting skin tones.
Pinpointing Your Ideal Flesh Tone
We always recommend using a skin color mixing chart when you begin to work with flesh colors. A color chart like this will include a wide range of shades and is a wonderful tool you can use to pinpoint the exact tone you want. Not only do you have to consider the overall flesh tone, but also the undertones. Flesh color undertones are complex and can include colors you would not expect, like green or blue!
Bringing Together Your Family of Shades
There is not a person in this world whose face is only a single shade. Natural variations in skin tones, including bags under the eyes and the contours of the face, are to be expected. Once you have selected your base skin color from your skin color mixing chart, you need to create a few variations of this tone. You will need some lighter tones for highlights on the nose, cheekbones, and forehead. It is also important to have a few darker variations of your chosen base skin color. The more variations in flesh tone you have, the more realistic your painting of skin will be. You can capture the nuances of the human face in much greater detail and create a more three-dimensional image.
The Basic Shades of Skin Tones and How to Mix Them
Despite the multitude of slightly different tones that are ideal for painting a human face, there are three broad levels of flesh tone: light, medium, and dark. Once you have determined which of these levels you are aiming for, mixing the family of shades is much simpler.
How to Mix Lighter Skin Tones
- Lighter flesh tones are typically the easiest to create. The colors you will need are red, yellow, and blue in equal proportions. Mix these three colors, and then you can use either white or a little more yellow to lighten the color. The lighter the skin tone you want, the more white you will add.
- To make the skin tone appear more blush, you can add a little more red paint. For more tanned skin tones, add more yellow and red paint.
- Play around with the proportions to find the perfect balance for your project. Blue is the color that will darken your skin tones, so use it with caution.
How to Mix Medium Skin Tones
- As the skin tone becomes darker, the number of color variations involved increases. Medium skin tones will generally incorporate colors like raw sienna and burnt umber from your skin color mixing chart.
- It is always best to start mixing a medium skin tone by creating an orange shade from red and yellow. The ratio of red to yellow depends on whether you want a more pink or tan flesh color. Once you have your orange shade, begin to add small amounts of blue paint. Slowly but surely definitely wins the race here, as you can always add more blue, but it can be hard to remove it.
- You can add a very (very) small amount of black paint for skin tones on the darker side. Keep adjusting until you are happy with your base color.
- There are some other color options with mixing medium skin tones. If you mix burnt umber with raw sienna at step one, you can create a much darker flesh color. You can use this mix instead of the blue, and this will create a more olive skin tone. You can also add a small amount of green paint at this stage.
To create the highlight variations of your base skin tone, you can use yellow to lighten your shade. Now it is time for experimentation. As with everything, practice makes perfect.
How to Mix Darker Skin Tones
- As we have progressed from light to dark, the mixing of skin shades becomes more tricky. We suggest starting your mixing process with red, yellow, purple, raw sienna, and burnt umber on your palette.
- We will start by creating two base undertones. Begin by mixing equal amounts of burnt umber and raw sienna. This mixture will be your initial base undertone. Your second base undertone will be a combination of equal parts of red and yellow. Now, mix both of your base undertones, forming your base shade.
- For the highlights and details, you will use purple, yellow, and red. To create your darker shade variations, slowly add purple. As there are so many colors already involved in this shade, adding black risks making it muddy. Another option for the lowlights is to use a dark grey.
- To create your highlights, add small amounts of yellow to your base shade. You can also make a rosier shade by adding a little more red color. Again, because there are so many different colors involved in your base shade, always add new colors in small increments.
Taking you from Rookie to Rembrandt
It is something that I would have loved when I was first starting to paint portraits with acrylics.
I’d always painted with Oils through art college and had used full strength turpentine – safe in the knowledge my fellow students were cool with the fumes and I had the luxury of time to wait for the Oil paint layers to dry (perfect time for a few pints down the pub!)
However, when the relaxing days of college ended, I found myself painting in a small studio at the front of a teapot factory that was open to the public and mounting bills to pay…now the 6-month drying time of Oils didn’t seem so attractive!
Plan B – a crash course in acrylics.
So I knew how to structure an Oil painting but translating that knowledge to acrylics, to make them look like Oils – wasn’t easy.
The paint tube names were different to the historical colours I’d used with Oils and they all seemed to be a lot brighter in saturation as well.
The acrylics seemed to dry so quickly – I didn’t have time to alter the shapes on the canvas and the edges of my brushstrokes were just too severe.
On top of that, there was a colour shift in the drying time of the paints, that kept on putting my mixes out.
I tried painting really thick …. then really thin and I did produce a lot of acrylic portraits, some award-winning but the subtleties of tone and smokiness of the Old Masters still alluded me.
I needed to change direction, think around the problem and come back with a new approach.
The Royal Seal of Approval
So how did the paintings turn out?
I had my portraits exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London, became a finalist in the Artists & Illustrators Portrait Artist of the Year and then I received the letter.
You know the ones you don’t really think exist. It was a letter wax sealed with a Royal Crest.
Had I been asked to paint the Queen?
Not quite, but for me, the prize was even better.
I’d been awarded a Queen Elizabeth Craft Scholarship to study Classical Portraiture in Florence, Italy.
I could finally put all the pieces of historical information I’d put together myself, into an order that worked for me.
It changed the way I painted and cemented my existing practice.
I developed a method that enabled me to get consistently natural skin tones, keep the paint wet whilst using the minimum amount of colours and this is what I want to teach you in this course.
Discover a method for mixing natural skin tones with Acrylics that look like Oils
The main problem with acrylics is they dry too quickly. You don’t have enough ‘blending time’ to create smooth subtle transitions.
But what if you did 80% of your mixing before you even picked up your brush?
If you just mix your portrait with the colours straight from the tube, you’re missing a trick.
Subtle mixes, scumbling and glazing effects can all be easily achieved with acrylics if you have the right approach.
We’re going to take techniques and colour palettes from the past Masters and combine them with the qualities and properties of acrylics, turning the ‘disadvantages’ of acrylics to our advantage.
