How do I mix skin tones that look like skin?

Skin defeats people because it is not one colour but a range across a single face, and because the eye is extraordinarily sensitive to when it is wrong. It is also translucent — light enters it and scatters before coming back out, which is why it has a glow that a flat opaque mixture never captures. Both problems are handled by working in temperature relationships rather than by hunting for the right colour.

Step by step

1. Mix from primaries rather than a tube flesh tint.A red, a yellow and a blue, plus white in opaque media, will give you every skin tone that exists. A tube colour called flesh is one point in a huge range and it is nearly always too pink and too saturated.
2. Establish the value first, in greyscale terms.Decide how light or dark the lit side of the face is before worrying about its hue. Skin tones drawn at the wrong value look wrong however good the colour is, and correcting the value usually fixes the perceived colour.
3. Desaturate more than feels right.Almost all skin is a muted, greyed colour rather than a bright one. The single most common beginner error is skin that is far too pink and too saturated. Add a small amount of the complementary to knock it back.
4. Vary the temperature across the face.A useful traditional observation: the forehead tends slightly yellow, the middle of the face around the nose and cheeks tends red because of blood supply, and the jaw and chin tend cooler and slightly green or blue, more so where a beard grows. Building that variation in is what stops a face looking like a mask.
5. Make the shadows cooler and more transparent, not just darker.Skin shadow is usually cooler and often shows a slight green or violet. Painted as the light mixture plus black or brown, it looks like dirt. Painted with a transparent cool glaze, it looks like flesh.
6. Watch for translucency at the edges.Ears, nostrils, fingers and the edges of a lit face glow warm and red where light passes through the tissue. A tiny amount of warm saturated colour at those places is startlingly convincing.
7. Reflect the surroundings.Skin picks up colour from everything nearby — a green lawn, a red jumper, a blue sky. Putting those reflections in is a large part of what makes a portrait sit in its environment rather than being cut out of it.
8. Mix a string of tones, not a single colour.Lay out a row on the palette: the lightest light, two mid tones, the shadow, the reflected light. Mix them in relation to each other before you start applying any of them, and you keep control of the whole range.

Tips

• Yellow ochre, a red, white and a blue is a classic and extremely capable portrait palette. Burnt sienna and raw umber extend it into deeper skin tones.
• For deeper skin tones, work from earth colours and stronger transparent reds and browns rather than by adding black to a light mixture, which greys and deadens. Burnt sienna, burnt umber and a transparent red oxide are the usual foundations.
• Test a mixture by putting a swatch next to the reference and squinting. The mismatch, if there is one, jumps out instantly when the detail is gone.
• Skin against a background is a relationship. A face that looks wrong often becomes right when the background next to it is adjusted, without touching the face at all.

Common mistakes

• Using a tube flesh tint straight from the tube — It is one narrow, saturated pink-orange, it looks the same everywhere it is used, and no real skin is that uniform or that saturated.
• Making shadows brown or black — Skin shadow is a cooler, often slightly green or violet version of the light tone. A brown shadow reads as grime and a black one as a hole.
• Painting the whole face one colour and then adding features — It produces a flat mask with drawings on it. Build the face out of value and temperature planes from the beginning.
• Adding white to lighten the lit areas — White desaturates. Skin highlights are lighter and often warmer, not paler and chalkier. Lighten with a light warm colour instead.

If it doesn't work

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