Welcome to the Demonstration Video for Mixing Non-Muddy Skin Tones

This video will walk you through my process of mixing a variety of skin tone values and temperatures to get you started. While you will be blending wet-on-wet paint on your canvas, it is important to pre-mix a variety of skin tones from one palette of colors. This ensures they remain harmonious with each other and that you know how to replicate a color, should you run low and need more. You don't have to mix every possible variation, but I recommend a variety of at least five:

1. The base skin color, also called your model's local color: this would be what your model's skin color would look like in natural light without being directly hit with a stong light or in shadow. This should be your biggest puddle of color, from which you will pull smaller puddles to mix the other variations.
2. A lit version of the base color: this will be a step lighter than the base skin color, where light is hitting the skin
3. A highlight version of the base color: this is the lightest version of your base or local color
4. A medium-dark: this is the skin tone within shadow but not in its darkest shade. It may represent part of the face in reflected light, meaning where some light bounces back into the shadow. It is not the darkest shade on the face.
5. A dark, to represent the shadowed version of the skin at its darkest.

You will be mixing steps of lighter and darker skin tones between each of these, but having your base/local skin color in the middle of this scale, and 2 steps lighter and 2 steps darker is a great place to begin your block in.

A note on color temperature: Generally, the lit areas of the face will be warmer and the shadows cooler. There are instances in which your portrait will show the reverse, however, and your shadows will be warm and the lit areas cool. As always, go with what you see.

As you'll learn in the video, if you truly feel there aren't really areas that are very cool, you can make the darker areas more neutral but not necessarily "cool" and they'll look cooler just by comparison with the warmer areas.

Please give this a try and have fun. Let me know how it goes or if you have any questions by sending me a comment here in the lesson or emailing me at [email protected].