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How to make realistic skin tones is one of the challenges of painting people. It took me awhile to realize that there is no real formula. You can mix every tone or color from the primaries red, yellow, and blue in watercolor. With acrylic paint, a bit of black and white helps. However, if you’re too realistic, you lose something. A painting that’s like a photograph, or in my case, more like a doll. Monotones and no personality. I’ve learned to paint using lots of colors and layers and collage. I’ve learned a lot from Gwenn Seemel on how to look and react to skin color and the dynamism of the human face. I’m trying to learn how to paint the light that shines forth from every being, and the prism of their personality.
I also like using no color at all, keeping color and race out of the picture:
St Foster Keeper of Stolen Wisdom
But I like to use a mixture of every color, too. It’s amazing to me how many tones and shades can be made by mixing and layering color.
One of the things I liked about working with fabric sculptures years ago is that I didn’t have to use skin tones at all. The figures could be any race, any body.
Dream Guide
I’ve experimented lately with some fauvism in my journal:
I think the hardest thing to learn is that there is no “right” way to mix skin tones, you have to develop your vision, and the way you interpret life is your own — a blend of your skills, your materials, and your vision.
My mistakes teach me so much, if I look at them as teaching tools, instead of mistakes.
When I work in acrylic, I use a parchment paper palette and I store it on moist paper towels in a sealed plastic box, my own stay wet palette. I got this system from this video by art teacher Ron Leger:
When the paper and paint start to show signs of age, I use up all the paint by just doing intuitive painting for back grounds and other projects.
I dripped leftover paint on this long canvas, then mixed a purple gray with the rest for another background. It helps to have a few “beginnings” around the studio. They speak to me, eventually and a painting gets started.
My last palette had all the colors I’ve used mixing skin tones on it. As I was thinking about skin tones, I had to think about race and all the tension that continues to plague the world over skin color.
I have enjoyed looking through the Humanae Project by Anjelica Dass who is photographing all the skin tones she can find in a very eye opening project that speaks to our uniqueness and the wide range of colors that can’t be contained by simple reductive terms of race.
Still we fight and we have difficulties understanding the world. Skin color is an easy way to draw lines between people. It makes it easy for those who would manipulate us for their own gain to turn us against each other. Skin color, race, identity are all volatile and vibrant ideas that swirl around our communities and countries.
So I took all these ideas, and all the colors on my palette and made this piece:
How do you mix skin tones? by Joy Murray, 8×10″, Acrylic and collage on canvas
What do you think?
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You can get prints and cards of some of my work on Redbubble. They also print my work on lots of other items, including phone skins, tote bags, shirts and journals:
If you’d like to support my art and writing, please consider becoming a donor on Patreon. If I get enough supporters, I can make this blog ad-free! Here’s a link to my Patreon page:
When feeling grief at it strongest, you think you’ll die. But you don’t. The mornings and nights keep coming. You find yourself distracted by that, the way life goes on. A crocus appears in the winter ground. A week later, a carpet of daffodils bloom where there was only winter-nipped grass. Tulip magnolias open on leafless trees. Camellias drop at your feet. You exhale. Your breath joins a billion others, giving life to earth, and the earth breathes back oxygen, and you live, you live, you live. You lower your shoulders, the grief somehow transformed into a scar, tough and visible, like so many you carry, like skin, like life. Flexible now, you remember to exhale, as you move into the new day.
She Exhales, acrylic and ink on canvas, 8×10″ by Joy Murray
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Thanks for reading my post. If you like it share it. If you find a typo, please let me know and I’ll send you a thank-you postcard.
You can get prints and cards of some of my work on Redbubble. They also print my work on lots of other items, including phone skins, tote bags, shirts and journals:
If you’d like to support my art and writing, please consider becoming a donor on Patreon. If I get enough supporters, I can make this blog ad-free! Here’s a link to my Patreon page:
Sometimes I think wonkiness is part of my DNA. Even when I measure things out and am very careful to try to follow lines, the things I make come out crooked or off balance. It’s not surprising, I suppose, since I am crooked and off balance.
My latest painting was started last week when it was raining and had been raining for what seemed like eternity. Before Valentines day, I bought a small bouquet of carnations to brighten up my room. And they have lasted and lasted, a bright bit of pink and white to rest my eyes on when everything else seemed gray and overcast.
So I decided to paint them. I wanted the gray background of the day, and so I put them in windowsill and went to work. It became a case of starting out with reality and ending up with something else — hopefully my delight at having tenacious flowers during a tenacious rainy season. But the measured window sill and frame I carefully drew became all out of balance as I painted, something I didn’t even notice til I scanned it.
Carnations on a Rainy Day, Acrylic, 8×10″ Joy Murray
Now it’s sunny and warmer, I’m starting to see spring blossoms here and there — camellias, daffodils, crocus, tiny hyacinths. It’s not quite the big burst of blooming I’ll see as we get closer to spring, but I’m glad we’re heading that direction. Meanwhile, I have my carnations, still healthy, and this wonky painting that I hope shows the way a flower can brighten a dark day.
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On February 28th (Thursday), I’ll be giving away a moon flower painting to one of my Patreon supporters:
Moon Flower Vine, watercolor and ink on paper, 7×10″
Patreon is a micro-donation platform that allows people who support my art to give a little bit each month to help me buy art supplies, pay living expenses, and have a little security. Even a little bit helps me so much. The monthly donation is automatically taken from your credit card each month.
You can get prints and cards of some of my work on Redbubble. They also print my work on lots of other items, including phone skins, tote bags, shirts and journals:
If you’d like to support my art and writing, please consider becoming a donor on Patreon. If I get enough supporters, I can make this blog ad-free! Here’s a link to my Patreon page:
joy murray art~stories~life 