There is gray (pale gray!) to some extent in all of his skintones. Perhaps you are getting stuck in the process of mixing grays from opposite colors. Perhaps you might try mixing a neutral gray paint (if you have it) with white, and then adding (just a touch!) of color to it when you have the value about right. You could start from a middle neutral gray (N5) if you have it, or from a lighter neutral gray (say, N7) if you want something lighter to begin with. You might still have to mix it with white in a 3-to-1 ratio to get the correct value (lightness) before you add any color. At least this way you can keep the two steps – getting the correct value, then getting the correct hue – separate, and it should help you if you need to troubleshoot where you are going wrong.

P.S. – Welcome to WetCanvas!

As far as other lines, I don’t know, but I do know that Golden Paints has Munsell Number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in their acrylics, and that their Williamsburg line of oils has special edition Munsell grays Numbers 2, 4, 6, and 8 – but only for a limited time. I can’t tell for sure, but I think your portrait is done in oils (nice painting, by the way!), so if I were you, I’d jump at the chance to pick up Munsell Numbers 6 and 8.

I also think you are right to add darker colors to lighter colors as you mix your paint. That is recommended by others, and not just me.

rltromble – your remarks about online reproductions are surely correct and it’s very difficult to judge how good the copy is without real first hand observation and memory. To my mind the best online source is the Google Art Project – Google it. From the well publicized investment that has been made I have to assume that the colours are correct – the resolution is certainly extraordinary. I enclose a tiny fragment from Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil.

Of course, how true the colours are displayed on your screen, or printed out, depends on how well calibrated your screen and printer are. That’s a whole ‘nother ball game.

I think perhaps my detection and sense of value just aren’t at a place where I can move in that direction while maintaining a cohesion of value and chroma.

That’s bound to be a substantial part of the problem, and would be true of most people attempting the subtlety of a Bouguereau.

Quite apart from that, however, you can’t hope to match the appearance of Bouguereau’s flesh with a single layer of paint, as these were obtained in many areas by the academic method of painting the lights thinly and translucently over a darker and sometimes more colourful layer. Virgil Elliott includes a demonstration and a couple of pages of discussion in his book Traditional Oil Painting. Here’s a short extract:

I’ve seen a protracted debate on another forum over whether some of the details of Elliott’s demonstration actually apply to Bouguereau, but at the very least he shows one way of obtaining a Bouguereau-like effect.

Bouguereau hand study from here:
http://inspirationalartworks.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/bouguereau-misc-studies-and.html
.

Generally, his flesh colors are values of gray, each with just enough hue in it to identify it as a specific flesh color. “Gray” is not a dirty word, in describing flesh colors. Those who choose to eliminate Black paint from their palette are probably destined to struggle more with those target colors than those who are willing to employ it. There are many ways to create “gray”, but beginning with Black and White is a pretty good start, in terms of effectiveness, and efficiency. The chief reason?……more control, with much less wild, offshoot, color swings.

I think, artist must eliminate (temporary!) all impressionistic garbage from his or her mind, as first step to paint in this style. No palette knives as a painting tool, no yellow and green spots on the skin, throw away any Monet’s ideas about “do not use black”, no Richard Shmidt, no Bob Ross. Avoid any visible brush strokes, any thickness, “fast foodish” painting recommendations :D. Those ideas are good to make a clone of Monet’s paintings (:thumbsup: ), but not useful for William-Adolphe Bouguereau portraits.

Skin on his portraits are very fresh, rose colors (vermilion +Alizarin?) are perfect, veins are bluish (I guess, he use a deep cobalt and black), yellow is very soft and “skinnish”. I think, one milligram of Cadmium yellow pigment or AZo stuff added to a paint can kill everything in his skin color. I really admire these fantastic skin tones! A great master colors!
http://www.bouguereau.org/Mignon-Pensive-large.html
He also knew a preraphaelites purple formula.

Yes, both Alex, and David made some excellent points regarding brush strokes in the previous two posts.

Strokes need to be subtle, and blended, with very little, if any evidence of visible, or dimensional brush strokes. The popular concept among more modern artists is the achieving of what I like to call the “carved granite” appearance, created by allowing brush strokes of varying hues, and values to be applied and left, unblended. That’s not the way DaVinci painted, with his soft, subtle, stippled strokes, and delicate blending using much finesse, and I don’t believe that Bouguereau intended for his humans to appear like carved granite, either.

Here is a detail of another study from the page I previously linked to, showing the superimposed layers very clearly, and what appear to be some “optical greys” formed by dragging a thin layer of flesh color over a dark underlayer:

[IMG]http://s3.amazonaws.com/wetcanvas-hdc/Community/images/18-Jan-2014/1189008-1_23_03_08_10_41_05-1.jpg[/IMG]

I don’t see that in this particular study. Where would you say this is visible?

It’s hard to judge with certainty from a digital picture, but I see a painting painted alla prima here, done on a light, ochre-ish (as seen in many of his other studies) toned canvas. I think this is one of the “secrets” to the liveliness of his flesh: to use a relatively light, warm underpainting, or tone and to allow this to shine through the (more or less transparant) shadows. My own experiments of this method have yielded very similar appearances. Greys especially get a very nice, lively quality this way.

In his more elaborated works, this effect tends to be somewhat less visible, though. He probably used more layers in his more finished paintings. As a consequence they do have more subtleties and depth in the flesh than his studies.