Dark skin is not a dark tube. Four pigments give our skin its color, and every one of them has a tube on my palette.

Burnt sienna and white is not a skin color. I mix the family first, then move the value until the mix sits right on my hand.

Painting a shadow over with darker paint covers all your work. I mix the lit side and the shadow side from one recipe, and I leave shadows light on purpose.

My first layer of skin looks pale and a little dead, and that is fine. Skin is not mixed. It is built, one layer at a time.

Most painters fix a wrong skin tone with another tube. My skin comes from the same five, and each one has a job.

Light and dark skin sit in the same narrow slice of the color wheel. The real work is on two other dials - value and chroma.

Every earth red on your palette leans warm. Except one - and that one is the reason a cheek can actually turn away from the light.

Skin shadows are not gray. They are red - and this ancient pigment is how painters have known that for 25,000 years.

Four blues walk into a flesh mix. Only one comes out clean - and the reason explains half of portrait painting.

Terre verte, the verdaccio tradition, and the three mixes that keep flesh from going sunburnt.

Let's start with the fact that there's actually no such thing as skin color. There is a skin tone.