How to Create A Palette for Skin Tone Painting

Many painters are having hard time to prepare their palette for skin tone colors. If you wish to paint a portrait you will need to have the right skin tone colors for it, otherwise as many beginners have noticed, people come out pink or brown and not close the human flesh texture tone. The skin colors you will need depend on the type of model you are about to paint. If it is a Caucasian person you will need more yellows if it is a dark skin figure you will need more earth brown tones.

The idea is to have several colors on your palette and to mix them accordingly to the skin tone you want to prepare. There should be yellows, and light brown, and white, and pink, placed in the wells compartments. The basic colors will always be the white, yellow and warm red. The browns can be earth colors ember, and even a pinch of blue. The darker earth colors and blue are used for the shading, as the shades have a cooler glow on the portrait.

Use a palette knife to mix the colors, or the tip of a watercolor brush. Just keep them clean so you get the right tones you prepared and not stained with other colors in the palette.

Explaining which colors to mix may be difficult to follow by reading, so we have brought you here a short tutorial video to explain and show how to mix the right colors for painting human skin tones.