Mixing Skin Tones in Acrylic

1 December 2016 / Workshops

Mixing skin tones was our exercise today. The hard part was that we only wanted to use the 3 primary colours red, blue and yellow.  As there are cool and warm colours we extended our colours to cool red, blue and yellow acrylic and warm red, blue and yellow acrylic to mix our base colour for the skin.

We started the base colour with the lightest colour yellow and added enough red to get a light orange. To tone down the brightness of the orange we added just the smallest amount of blue to the mix.

And of course we were allowed to add white to the mix.

We then varied the base colour with adding extra red for a more rosy complexion. Or yellow for a more asian and bluu to achieve darker skin tones

Our first mix was with only cool colours 

The next example uses cool red and yellow but warm blues

This example uses cool red and warm yellow and blue

The following example uses warm red blue and yellow for our base colour

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