Mixing the Colors for Painting Portraits
Hi, this is Alex Shundi, and this is How – To – Paint – A – Portrait, in this clip, I’m gonna show you how to mix colors, and in particulars flash tones. What I would like to do now is to mix a skin tone that is a, what’s called a middle tone, meaning that it’s in between cool and warm, in between dark and light. Now, the cool and warm means warm going toward the reds and the yellows and cools obviously going toward the blues and the greens or the dead brown. Now, you begin by putting down white, and then like a rainbow yellow, eventually red, eventually brown, eventually blue and eventually green. The reason why you do that is that you have a pretty good understanding as to the chromatic differences according to the rainbow. Another good idea is to actually place your tubes in the same sequence with which you’ve place the colors in your palette, so whenever you run out of color, you can just go directly and grab the tube and will save you some time. Rather than having to go look for it. Now, you begin by putting down a white, this happens to be a premarble white which is a very good combination between zinc and titanium, and then I’m gonna put a little bit of yellow which is a cadmium yellow light. If I take the cadmium yellows and the reds, a little bit of serillian blue, a little bit of alizarin crimson, a tiny touch of green, it can be green earth and or sap green and mix your colors in such a way to approximate flash. At that point, I’m gonna look at the model, we’ll gonna look at the sitter to average out a tone, meaning that I’m gonna look at her and see which color in her face is the most apparent, is the most middle one. If we would take a black and white photograph, for instance, which one would be an absolute gray. I now mix this middle tone, this is going to be serving as a kind of a pool from which I will then make things that are darker and lighter, warmer and cooler. Having mixed a generous pool of it, I am going to try to make it a little bit more fluid. In order to do that, I wanna take my palette knife, dip it in little bit of oil and then allow the oil to mix itself with the paint, therefore rendering the paint much more creamy, much more easily applicable, and easier to flow on the canvass. At this point, I am going to try to get a much brighter tone, a lighter and brighter tone for a high point reflections that are facing the light. To do that, I’m gonna begin by taking just a tiny bit of my middle tone and adding the brightest and warmest possible color I can. Simultaneously, I might wanna now make a cooler tone that is also light. So again I dip from my middle tone and add a cool tone, what will be a cool tone, anything except yellow and red, in essence. Therefore, I’m gonna take a little green and a little bit of blue. Now remember that whenever you’re using white, you are doing two things. Number one is that you’re making whatever tone you’re adding white to, obviously lighter, but you're also making it cooler. As you can see, the colors are mixed, and so we’re gonna go on to the next clip, where I’m gonna show you how to put that color down in an under painting.