What colors can you get a flesh color?

In order for a painter's portrait to turn out to be alive and natural, the artist must be able to make up a flesh color well. Each painter has his own secrets of mixing colors, but still there are general rules and patterns, knowing which, you can easily make up any shades. Let's learn this art together!

How to get flesh color?

Let's say you decided to paint an oil painting. What colors do you need to have on hand to get the color of a person from them ? First, you need to stock up on white, but you need to be delicately applied, in small portions, mix other colors. The healthy color of human skin is always a gentle warm shade, because all our skin is permeated with a tiny network of blood vessels. For the experiment, take a sheet of white paper, attach it to the face of the pale young lady, and you will see how strikingly the lightest flesh color differs from the lifeless white color of the paper sheet.

So, to the whitewash must be applied such colors as ocher, cadmium yellow, cadmium red and, perhaps, may still come in handy sienna or umber. But the last paint can be used only when applying shadows and very carefully. Press on the palette from the tube a little whitewash, dissolve them with a solvent and mix them with a little bit of ocher, red and yellow. In this case, ocher should be used more, and the rest of the colors, of course, less.

Different shades of flesh-colored

In painting there are no ready-made recipes of different shades, it all depends on the intuition of the artist and, of course, on the complexion of his model. After all, if you draw a man with a swarthy skin, then his flesh color will be significantly different from the color of the skin of an unadorned pale man.

Then you need to know that women's skin is more light and gentle tones than men. And the body color of the trunk, arms and legs is also darker than the skin of the face. Different parts of the body may differ in color. In painting there is such a thing as reflexes. It is a reflection on the surface of objects of color spots that are nearby. For example, if your model has a red cap on its head, then a warm reddish glow will certainly fall on the person you want to draw. All this must be taken into account when working on a portrait.

How to achieve a flesh color when drawing with watercolors?

With watercolor everything is much simpler, but to someone this material may seem more complicated than oil. The fact is that when working with watercolors, white paper plays the role of white. After all, watercolor is transparent, and it should be applied very easily, so that the bottom strokes are visible through the upper ones.

Now we start to make a flesh color. Take a plastic palette, drip a little water on it. Then take a soft squirrel brush, wet it well and lightly, with the very tip, brush it over the red watercolor paint from the box. Then stir with this brush in the water palette, and you will have a faint transparent pink color. Add a little yellow there, just do not overdo it, you need quite a bit. And you can start to paint a portrait.

Examples of portraits, on which the ideal flesh color. Photos of these pictures

In the history of Russian painting there were many artists who painted portraits beautifully. Rokotov, Levitsky, Bryullov ... Take a reproduction of the portraits of any of these painters and consider as follows. With what skill did they manage to transmit the most complex bodily shades!

Here, for example, Maria Lopukhina's portrait of the work of VL Borovikovsky. What a wonderful complexion of this woman and how expertly conveyed the freshness and youth of her skin! Try to solve the secret of the artist. What colors did he use to achieve such a result, do you think? Only to fight over the answer to the secret of the great master of painting is best sitting at the easel with a palette and a brush in his hands.