Flesh tint in oil

[Cynthia Daniel]

Originally posted by tabasco7 in the old forum:

Please post some tips on mixing flesh tints here.

## Would like formulas or proportions of tube paint for middle and light tones, rather than simple colors. I am using a base of 1 part cad. red, 1 part cad. orange, and 1 part burnt umber mixed together. I figure mid tone would be about 5 per cent base color to white ( titanium/zinc white combo). Sometimes i mix an additional part mars yellow to the base mixture. I use a three tone system on the the palette, mixing the middle tone first and then adding white to a light tone an burnt umber or burnt sienna to a dark tone. Sometimes i add a fourth tone with a little mars yellow added to the middle tone. I used to start out with a pure cad. red and mars yellow mixture, but this didn't seem to lighten up correctly with dead white.

## You can modify kitchen spatulas into painting knives. Get some of the 7-9 inch kitchen spatulas (preferably stainless steel ) and cut them into different shapes with a tin snip. After cutting the shapes, you can use a whetstone to remove burrs and thin the metal. if you can cut the shape somewhat like the figure eight, the knife won't be too stiff. Ideally the knife should be flexible enough to lay about a inch on the canvas when pressed. Also, several pieces shaped like a letter opener (down to about one eighth width) are useful.

## On the palette, mixing a drop of boiled linseed oil to one inch of tube paint seems to help apply the paint with the knife. Sometimes I mix a pinch of pumice to the white on the palette, before using the palette knife. At first, i lay the paint down just thin enough to be opaque on the canvas; also the thinner layers dry faster. After using the knife, you can use a bristle brush or a wad of plastic wrap to roughen the surface of the paint. Also, tapping the knife up and down will give some broken color effects. I've even used a wheel pizza cutter on the canvas to make some broken lines.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Originally posted by Karen Martin at [email protected] www.portraitartist.com/martin

After reading your question regarding the mixing of skin tones my first reaction is that you are limiting yourself by being so concerned with proportion and which colors to use as a standard. I find that it depends completely on the subject whether or not to be using Burnt Umber or Burnt Sienna, Naples yellow or Cad yellow light...

Generally I underpaint the whole area first with a mixture (about half and half of burnt umber, raw umber, and a touch of Veridian. Sometimes, though, I use a wash of Cad Red with Crimson Lake, or just plain Veridian. I indicate shadow areas first with raw umber, often with a touch (5%?) of Ultramarine Blue. For middle tones I prefer Naples Yellow with a smidgeon (not an acurate proportion, I know) of Indian Red, and the approporiate amount of Titanium White. From there I might add some Cad Yellow Light, Cad Red, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Rose Madder, or even Cerulean Blue to areas which need cooling. I almost never use Cad Orange or Mars Yellow . People with dark skin often require Diox Purple in the mix

I personally don't think there is a "formula" for mixing skin tones. I look at each area of the skin to be painted and mix a color to match it and then daub them onto the area where needed, almost like a mosaic, blending afterwards.

Hope this is helpful.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Originally posted by Brian Neher at [email protected]
www.portraitartist.com/neher

After reading your posting on mixing flesh tints I thought that I might offer some advice that has helped me. I can only speak from my own experience, so I hope that it will be of some use to you. In order to achieve effective results in mixing flesh tones one must first have a solid knowledge of color theory. By keeping a mental picture of the color wheel in mind, you can mix just about any color that you wish. The use of complimentary colors is a vital key in producing convincing flesh tones. From your posting, it sounds like you are relying on all warm colors of different values in order to paint flesh. There needs to be a balance of both warm and cool colors when painting skin tones. The overall temperature of the skin may be warm, but cool colors must also be included in order to create a sense of volume, which gives the illusion of depth. One of the first things to find out is if your light source is warm or cool. By doing this, you can then determine whether your shadows are going to be warm or cool. For example, if you have a warm light source, such as incandescent light or direct sunlight, then your shadow areas are going to be somewhat cool. If your light source is cool, such as indirect sunlight, then your shadow areas are going to be somewhat warm in comparison to the other colors that are already on your canvas. In regards to complimentary colors, you can mix them together to produce what is referred to as a "gray" of varying degrees of cool or warm depending on how much of the warm or cool color that you add. These grays are often used in an area of painting when the form turns, referring to a plane which begins to recede away from the viewer's eye.

For example, if you have an indoor subject whose light source is warm and leans more toward the orange side, then in order to mix an appropriate gray you would lean towards the blue side of the color wheel.

Or if you had a color that was an orange/yellow then the compliment to mix would be a blue/violet. The concept of color can be simplified by using the model of the color wheel. Temperature changes in flesh tones, meaning changes in color such as from warm to cool or cool to warm are also a vital part of painting convincing skin tones. Say you have an outdoor subject whose face is entirely in shadow with very close values and not a lot of strong lighting or drawing to "hold on to". How are you going to paint this situation? One key is to use a temperature change instead of a value change. That means that in this situation the colors that are falling on the top planes of the face are going to be cooler than those on the bottom planes. The reason being is that the top planes are influenced by the cool blue sky when in indirect light outdoors and the bottom planes are a result of reflected light that is bouncing off of the ground or any other object that is nearby and produces a warmer color in relation to the top planes.
Change the color but keep the values the same or very close.

I hope that I haven't confused you by saying all of that. To narrow it down, some very important aspects to painting flesh tones are using complimentary colors and temperature changes. The best advice I can give you is to study the old masters such as Sargent and Sorolla. Look to see where they have made a temperature change and try to find out why they have done so. Also, the best exercise that an artist can do is to paint from life. By doing so you can see subtle colors and values, which a camera does not capture. Every color that you put on your canvas should have a purpose. Throwing bright color on your canvas in order to "brighten" up a painting without knowledge of where those colors should go is not good practice. Some good books on color theory are "Hawthorne on Painting" by Charles W. Hawthorne and "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials" by Harold Speed. Both of these are put out by Dover publications. As far as a base mixture, you can try some gold ochre mixed with cad red and white for a start. You can then mix your cool colors into this base in order to achieve some nice grays. I hope that this information will be of some use to you.

[Cynthia Daniel]

Originally posted by Karen Martin at [email protected] www.portraitartist.com/martin

Hi bportrait! Your advice is "right on" and your use of warm sides vs cool sides is something I learned to employ when I studied with Joe Bowler many years ago. I know tobasco7 will benefit from your advice

[Todd Shaffer]

I think all of the advice has hit the mark. The warm vs. cool is especially important. Don't limit yourself to color 'recipes.' They will never do justice to the subject as well as a sensitively trained eye. Flesh tones are often full of greens, oranges, deep purples, etc. When you are honest with your subject and paint what you are seeing rather than what you think you see (recipe here, recipe there) your work will be exciting and rise above the typical. For a good book on color get the classic book by Charles Hawthorne titled "Hawthorne on Painting." It will change your approach to color.

[Chris Saper]

My appraoch to mixing skin tones is perhaps divergent from yours, but may be one you would find helpful.

I do not believe that a painter can be formulaic about skin color; I do, however, think that one can be sytematic, and develop an approach which works across a variety of media and diverse skin color."Painting Beautiful Skin Tones with Color & Light" deals entirely with how one might answer this question...I'll try to briefly summarize the decision-making approach.

I mix skin color by making two fundamental decisions: First, what is the local color of a particular subject's skin? Second, what factors are modifying the local color?

Local skin color consists of three things:

1. Hue. All skin color contains some aspect of orange. Decide where on the red-yellow continuum your suject's skin hue lies.

2. Value. Determine the average value of your subject's skin.

3. Saturation. Decide how greyed-down your subject's skin color is, and whether is it neutralized with blues, greens or violets.

Local color will be mdified by a number of factors, like adjacent or reflected colors, but nothing is a more powerful modifier,in my view, than the color of light on your subject. The color of light drives skin color in light as well as in shadow, and they are different colors, rather than lighter or darker versions of local color.

Whenever you mix two different hues together, the resulting color is different in temperature than either of the original colors...including white and black, which can be very strong cooling influences. So every time I add a new color to a mixture, I check the temperature of the new color to see if it needs to be adjusted.

I note from your question that your palette includes several earth tones. As my standard palette does not contain earth tones (only 6-7 tube colors plus black and white) I could not offer advice about their use. I think every painter selects the size and components of his or her own palette based on a variety of things, including philosophy, personal sense of color, temperment, and how each was taught. I think though, whatever your view, that you can apply this approach,and see if it is useful to you.

Best Wishes

[John de la Vega]

Ah, the desire to find formulas to paint flesh! Probably as old as the cave paintings. All the non-adherence to formula - advice and individual - subject flesh tones given here is excellent advice.

Since color and, being a portraitist, flesh colors are subjects dear to my painter's heart, here's goes my hat in the ring (or some such expression).

In my experience, paying close attention to the light, its quality and quantity, as Brian Neher so aptly advices, is the most important factor affecting our use of color, in the flesh and everywhere else. Reading the light environment, the amount of light diffusion, temperature, brightness, and other subtle factors which affect our perception and our capacity to fully understand what we are looking at in order to paint it requires knowledge and practice. I recommend Ted Seth Jacobs' "Light for the Artist", a must read - and - use book for the understanding of light and form, the main equation of painting. That's our true starting point, remembering that LIGHT IS COLOR AND COLOR IS LIGHT


LIGHT = color = FORM


Light makes love to the form, and their instant offspring is color. "Charles Hawthorne on Painting" is indeed a terrific book for understanding painting color. I had the great fortune to study with one of Hawthorne's disciples, Henry Hensche, before he died a few years ago. Henry revolutionized, even more than his teacher, the way color was and is being taught in this country.

For him, all painters before the Impressionists painted 'mud'. Not quite the case, of course, but Henry had a very forceful, often dogmatic, way of gaining converts to his religion of seeing and painting color in a new way. If you don't believe me, seek out some of his color - happy disciples (among whom I do not quite include myself) such as Susan Sarback, bless her dear painter's heart, who wrote a great book called "Painting Radiant Colors in Oils". Henry Hensche's tremendous legacy is alive and well all over this country and probably the world, and his principles and techniques are still being taught in his school in Provincetown, Mass.

For fair light skin tones, especially in the lighter areas, I DO NOT recommend using any of the Cad Reds, including Vermillion. The reason is that the Cads do not really mix well with white. The cads are great as modifiers in those subtle mixtures for transition areas where the form / light changes very delicately, on the smallish planes, and for glazes and feathery scumbles (ah, transitions and edges, one of the main themes of my next book, which I seem to be writing right here).

Nothing wrong with a base of some yellow and some red for the light skin which we can then modify at will depending upon illumination, skin color, etc. The red I use is Rose, and the yellow I use is Naples Deep. A delightful, smiling woman in one of my last workshops said "I only use Rose when I paint flowers'. Rose and Naples, of course, already have some white in them, and they mix beautifully together and with white and other yellows and reds, as long as they are together to begin with. As anybody who paints knows, mixing goes on constantly. The trick is to keep color clean by smart and controlled mixing strategies. Best Rose: Old Holland Schveningen Rose Deep (expensive). Best Naples Yellow Deep (you guessed it): Old Holland (not expensive). A beautiful, not expensive Rose is Rowney Rose, made by Daler-Rowney. Unless you happen to be painting in Bangladesh, and ran out of Old Holland Naples Deep, why not use the best?

I also DO NOT recommend the use of Burnt Umber, or any browns for that matter (with the exception of Burnt Sienna, judiciously), on ANY part of the skin, including shadows. Even in those 'dead' shadows and 'dead' middle tones (if there is such a thing, which I suppose depends on the blimey light or, our capacity to see how light creates movement and vibration even in the shadows), using browns such as Burnt Umber is a recipe to end up with Henry's worst mud.

We should also remember that 'painting what we see' in the way of color is NOT always the best artistic strategy, no matter how realistically we wish to paint, especially in the first stages of the painting. One of the most important things I learned from the great Nelson Shanks is "Start Bright! (high chroma, even on the garish side)". As subtle modeling and refining progresses, color will find its way to reality, if 'local' color, vibrant or dull, is what you're intent on seeing and painting

I mix my browns with Rose, Alizarin (or Carmin Lake, a better Old Holland Alizarin) and bright or not so bright yellowish Greens, even an occasional smidget of Ultramarine, Cobalt, Magenta (I highly recommend Maimieri Puro Verzino Violet, a fabulous, rich, inexpensive Magenta ), or Dioxazine Mauve, adding cads and other reds as needed, for maximum VIBRANCY in the shadows. If there is a formula for color, whether on flesh, an apple, or a sunset, the recipe is simple:

MAKE IT VIBRATE

VIBRATION is, after all, in the very nature of light and, come to think of it, in the very nature of form itself(eternal dance of the atoms and molecules). Nobody understood this better than the Impressionists. They changed our vision and how we deal with color as painters and art lovers forever.

Next chapter: Ah, those middle tones! or, as my friend and fellow Sorolla lover the late Adrian Hernandez, a wonderful pastellist, once remarked as he looked at one of my pastels: "How to you make those darn things (the middle tones) look light and dark at the same time?"

[Pam Phillips]

Does anyone ever use black when painting flesh? The use of black for anything at all was considered such a taboo when I was at school, that all these years later I still avoid it.

[John de la Vega]

John Singer Sargent loved black, and probably used it in some mixtures in the flesh. When he met Monet he was surprised not to find find black at all in the Frenchman's palet, and remarked that he himself couldn't paint without it. There's no doubt that Sargent's sense of color was never the same after he was exposed to Monet and impressionism in general, and I suspect he used black less from then on, particularly in the flesh, even though he probably never gave up the color (or the 'non-color') as most of the impressionists themselves did.

I love black and have it on my palette, but never use it in the flesh, and frankly, Pam, I don't recommend you to use it, unless, of course, you're Sargent himself reincarnated.

[Chris Saper]

Dear Pam,

I use black on my palette but I would never use it to actually paint something that is black. Instead I mix black from Alizarin and Thalo Green. Other mixtures will work well, too, for instance the ultramarine blue + transparent oxide red used by Bob Johnson.

I do occasionally use black in skin tones but only in the most microscopic amounts, in order to cool a color I have already mixed. I use this cooling tool only in skin tones that are light in value. Where skin tones are dark in value, either because of local color or shadow, I mix rich darks based on my perception of the local color, the color of the light, and whether I perceive the local color to be neutralized with relatively warmer or cooler hues.

Best wishes, Chris