How to Paint Skin Tones in Layers (My Oil Portrait Method)
Skin is not mixed. It is built.
Most painters who try skin tones in layers believe the first layer has to look right. So they mix and remix, chasing the final color in one pile. When the first layer comes out pale and flat, they decide the painting has failed.
It has not. The first layer of my portraits looks pale. It looks flat. A little dead. And that is fine. It is not the painting. It is only the first layer: a basic skin tone, and a little play with the values.
Because skin is not mixed. It is built. The same skin recipe stays on my palette from the first layer to the last, and there is a different mix in every layer. Each one a little closer to the final brush stroke.
I made a video about how I build skin in layers, from the drawing to the day the finishing starts.
Direct and indirect painting
There are two basic ways to paint in oil.
Direct painting is wet into wet, start to finish, in one go. The best-known form of it is alla prima.
Indirect painting means you build the picture in layers. A layer goes on. It dries. And the next one goes on top of it.
I paint both ways, but not for the same reason. First, the layers.
The classic system: three layers after the drawing
The classic system has three layers, and it is the way I painted for many, many years. The layers come after the drawing. The drawing is not a color layer.
The monochromatic layer. One color. Only light and shadow. Like a black and white photograph of the picture.
The color layer. The old name for it is the dead color: muted, not alive yet.
The final layer.
The idea behind it, building a painting in stages, goes back to the Renaissance. In that period, much of the color was built with glazes: thin, transparent paint over lighter paint. By the Baroque period, painters were building the layers from the paint itself, with glazes only in places.
It is a good system. You can learn it, and use it. The lesson in it is simple: a layered painting is built in stages, and every stage only has to bring you closer.
What I do today: the first layer is only a start
In the last couple of years I work more freely. I do not follow those three layers one by one anymore.
I start with the drawing. Then a thin, transparent layer goes over it: transparent red ochre. Sometimes I wipe it back with a cloth, sometimes I don't. The result is the same.
I let it dry completely. Now there is dry paint over the drawing, and the next layers will not mix any of the charcoal into the paint.
Then the first layer of paint. First what is around the face, which on this portrait is the hair. Then the skin. My skin recipe goes on the palette here, and it stays there from the first layer to the last.
What happens in this layer depends on the painting, and on my mood. Sometimes I experiment. I throw in colors that make no sense at all, and people who see it think I have gone crazy.
On this portrait I kept it basic. I mixed a base skin tone and played a little with the values. It came out like the color layer of the classic system: muted, not alive yet.
So if your first layer looks dull, you did not fail. You are just not finished. The first layer is only a start, and it is allowed to look wrong.
Building skin tones in layers: the second layer
The next day, I check that the first layer is dry. By then the colors have sunk. They look duller than when I painted them. So before I start again, I wake the layer up a little.
Then the second layer goes on. The same recipe. One thing changes: the white. In the first layer I like titanium white. From here on, lead white.
As the layers go on, I converge. The first layer showed me what works on this face and what does not. So I mix toward the colors I want this person to have.
And the first layer is not wasted. Where the new paint is thin, it still shows through and becomes part of the new layer.
My palette at the end of a layer is a mess. That is normal. It should be like that. Every one of those mixes is another value of the same skin, something to choose from.
So the recipe did not change. The mix did. And it will change again in the next layer, and the next. Do not look for the final color in one mix. Get closer with every layer.
Fat over lean, and my medium
Layers of oil paint can crack. To prevent that, the layers have to be fat over lean.
Lean means little oil. Fat means more oil. The first layers are lean, and as the layers go up, the paint carries more oil.
Another way to say the same rule: the layer underneath should dry faster than the one on top.
That is why my medium, what I thin the paint with, changes. In the first and second layers I use a little Liquin Original. It makes the paint dry fast.
From the third layer on, if I use a medium at all, it is one I mix myself, with oil in it: about half stand oil, half turpentine, and a tiny touch of Liquin Original. More oil.
Fast and lean first, more oil later. And let the first layers dry.
The finishing, and where the glaze goes
The third layer is not the end. It is the start of the finishing, and the finishing can go on for many days. Weeks. Even months.
The recipe is the same. What changes is how I work: smaller brushes, and more attention to detail.
And sometimes, a glaze. A glaze is thin, transparent paint over paint that is already dry.
In the way I paint, the color is in the paint. The glaze comes late, on very small areas of shadow. Normally a transparent red. Maybe a little transparent dark green. That is all. This is where new tubes come onto my palette: late.
A glaze can only take light away. It never adds any. So if I plan to glaze, I keep those areas a little lighter in the layers before, and the glaze takes them down. Plan it early, and leave it room.
Where painting it all in one go fits in
So why not paint it all in one go and finish in an afternoon?
Well, you can. That is alla prima, and I do it too, when I have the mood and the energy to finish a whole painting right now. I work loose. I work for hours. And I want the paint to stay wet.
But more often, for me, alla prima is a sketch. I use it to test color ideas for a bigger painting. Sometimes a few sketches of the same painting. And then the painting itself, in layers.
At the end of the video I take one small portrait through all of it, layer by layer, from the drawing to the day the finishing starts. And not one of those layers was the finished skin on its own.
What to do with this
Next time you start a portrait, mix a base skin tone, play a little with the values, and stop there. Let it dry. Then come back the next day with the same recipe and mix toward the colors this face needs.
I hope this helped. Tell me in the comments under the video: do you paint in one go, or in layers? The next episode is the lit side and the shadow side. You are welcome to subscribe to the channel.
Visit the Color Mixing Book Library. The recipes behind my own portraits and the old masters' faces, written down recipe by recipe. See the library
Additional topics worth reading:
Comments