When painting a portrait or figure, accurately capturing different skin tones can be challenging. Mixing the perfect tan skin color requires carefully balancing your pigments. With the right paints and techniques, you can mix a realistic tan for your painting. Understanding how to manipulate hue, value, and chroma is key.
Choose Paints with Warm, Yellow Undertones
The first step in mixing tan skin tones is choosing paints with a warm, yellow undertone. Human skin contains yellow carotenoid pigments as well as red blood underneath. Mixing yellows, reds, and browns will produce a believable tan skin color.
Good paint choices include cadmium yellow or yellow ochre for the yellow. For red, try cadmium red or burnt sienna. Raw umber or burnt umber will add brown. Oils and acrylics both work well for mixing skin tones. Avoid cool blues, greens, whites, and blacks, as these will mute the lively glow tan skin has.
Start with a Yellow Base
Always begin your tan skin color by mixing a yellow base. Yellow ochre or cadmium yellow medium are excellent choices. The yellow base will impart a golden glow. Make sure you are using opaque pigments so the colors mix cleanly. Transparent glazes will cause the layers underneath to show through.
After mixing the yellow base, add small amounts of red, brown, and white to alter the hue, value, and chroma. Keep the yellow as the predominant pigment to retain warmth.
Add Red for Blood Underneath the Skin
Next, incorporate red into the yellow base. Red accounts for the blood flowing underneath the skin. Mixing in red also shifts the hue towards orange, cooling down the bright yellow.
Burnt sienna and cadmium red are typical choices. Vary the proportion of red to adjust the skin’s undertone. Less red results in a more golden, yellow-toned tan. More red gives an orangey, ruddy tan.
Deepen Value with Browns
Adding a small amount of brown will lower the value of the tan. Browns enrich the mix and bring it closer to an actual skin tone. Raw umber and burnt umber are ideal browning agents.
Introduce brown slowly into the mix. You only need a dab to deepen the tan without making it sallow. Brown cuts through the intensity of the yellow base, muting it towards tan.
Lighten with White
Once you have the right hue from the yellow, red, and brown, you can lighten the value with white. Titanium white is the best choice, as it has no warm or cool bias. Adding white will make the tan lighter, improving its tonal range.
Remember that skin has layers of values from shadows to highlights. Mix several variations of your tan paint with more or less white to capture these subtleties.
Match Different Skin Areas
Skin varies in tone across different parts of the body. The face, limbs, and torso each have a unique tan hue. It helps to mix a few customized tans rather than using a single, uniform color.
| Skin Area | Tone |
|---|---|
| Face | Lighter, more yellow |
| Arms/Legs | Darker, more red |
| Torso | More neutral tan |
The face has thinner skin and needs a lighter, golden tan. Arms and legs are exposed to the sun and require a ruddier, darkened tan. The torso sits in the middle with an even, medium tan.
Glazing and Layering
For the most realistic results, built up transparency and depth in the skin using glazing and layering. Start with thin initial washes of color. Then reinforce the shadows and midtones. Finally, add thick opaque highlights.
This technique mimics real skin, which appears translucent in some areas and more opaque in others. Blend edges softly between layers so no hard lines exist.
Add Temperature Variation
Human skin is full of subtle temperature variations. Warm forehead, cool eyelids, hot cheeks, neutral chin, etc. You can suggest this beauty in a painting by making small adjustments to the skin mixes.
Add a hint of green or blue to cool down certain areas. Intensify the yellow/red in warm spots. Keep these alterations delicate to avoid abruptly shifting the hue.
Refine Details and Textures
Final refinements will bring life and realism to the facial features, hair, lips, eyes, etc. Define strands of hair and eyebrows with thin brush strokes. Use warmer, more saturated reds on the lips, nose, ears, and cheeks.
Lightly stipple, scumble, or crosshatch brush marks to build texture. Mark subtle contours around muscles and bones. Refine oilier areas like the forehead, nose, and eyelids for a convincing glow.
Practice Mixing for Consistency
Achieving consistent skin tones takes plenty of practice and observation. Set up paint swatches and a mirror to repeatedly test and match your mixes. Study skin under varied lighting to master how it transforms.
Regularly paint figures and portraits from life, applying your tan skin tones. Over time, you will gain an intuitive feel for mixing accurate tans.
Conclusion
Successfully depicting tan skin in a painting relies on choosing suitable warm, yellow-based pigments. Balance the red, yellow, brown, and white to fine-tune the exact hue, value, and intensity desired. Vary the mixes slightly to capture differences across facial areas and limbs.
Work in transparent layers, gradually building up texture and detail. With careful observation and practice, you will be expertly mixing realistic tan skin colors. Pay attention to the subtleties of temperature, contours, and textures that bring life to skin.
