[Richard Budig]

For Chris Saper:

Chris:

I know those warm and cool neutral mixes you mentioned earlier in this thread. I've long used Raw Umber with varying amounts of white to mix into other colors in order to temper (reduce their vigor) them, such as with cad red or burnt sienna to make a softer, pinker, cooler skin tone, and with Yellow Ochre to make those peculiar greens, and so on.

Would you tell me how you use the Raw Sienna/black mix, and perhaps other of your favorite "tempering" mixes.

This has been one of my most difficult parts of painting flesh tones -- the part about knocking them back. It doesn't take a genius to pile on reds, yellows, or combinations of these when the flesh is bright and fresh, but moving into those subtle and somewhat cooler half tones is sometimes a puzzler.