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Just to eliminate all the anguish, please allow me to offer a few suggestions, regarding skin colors for painting a portrait.
First, nearly all human skin colors can be simulated by using only 4 colors:
White, Black, Yellow Ochre, and Venetian Red (also known as Terra Rosa).To check this out, just use only these 4 colors, and by mixing them together, you will be able to absolutely match the base color of your own skin. Check this out by mixing these colors together until you can smear some of your paint mixture on your own forearm, and not be able to detect where your skin begins, and the mixed color leaves off.
I will guarantee that this can be done.
However, many of these old masters paintings contain very little, actual “red”.
Take the Mona Lisa for example:
These callout colors represent the true colors of which much of her skin is composed. Print this out, mix your paint to match these color blocks, and compare your mixtures by smearing paint right on top of (or next to) these samples.
There should be no mystery concerning the colors that occur within old master portraits such as the Mona Lisa. Mixing colors with paint, to match actual colors of old master portraits is a very easy thing to do.
wfmartin. My Blog "Creative Realism"...
https://williamfmartin.blogspot.comActually, there is little doubt in my mind that the original Mona Lisa looked more like this, in which case the top color would require some Venetian Red:
From what I’ve seen Mal3 post so far, he’s completed the underlayers and is seeking advice on the glazing ~ hence the portrait he’s posted is light and pale, and will have, possibly, slightly darker tones as a result of the glazing layers. So I think the question Mal3 is asking, is what mix to use for the glazing over the present version of his portrait to get the rosy, natural skin tones in the Renaissance style? Naturally, the present Mona Lisa is very dark and dirty from centuries of exposure, and the aging varnishes – so that’s not natural skin colour, I don’t think. PInguino is closer, but perhaps the Prado Museum’s restored contemporary copy of DaVinci’s painting is more the colouration, based on the background colours Mal3 has used, and the light skin tones (pre-glazing)?
Some background on this painting, and another image with different colour balance here.
Here’s a close-up from the Prado painting, post cleaning/restoration, something I don’t think they’ll ever do to DaVinci’s painting. It is thought that since the evidence is pointing to this painting below having been painted in DaVinci’s workshop, it is speculated that the painter saw the original, fresh-of-the-easel Mona Lisa:
Source: The wiki entry image, from my previous post. When I click on that image first once, then I clicked on the new image again, and lastly clicked on the image I was looking at once more ~ there’s an amazingly detailed close up to pan around on. What a delight:)
Surely there are contemporary options for a final glazing in this style?
The amazing Will Kemp’s latest offering I’ve received in my email is about glazing techniques, here’s his preview:
He trained in classical Italian methods himself. It appears he premixed a succession increasingly “fat” (more oil?) glazes…
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