I Tried To Paint Skin By Layering Color

Last week, I explained how I took my painting and turned it around when it was going badly. This week, I'll be talking about how my original plan for that painting went.

As you know, if you read last week's post, I started with a green underpainting, in which I layed down her values and added in her features.

I then started to add the first, very thin layers of pink.

I know you can't see any pink yet, but that's kind of what I wanted at this point. It wasn't until the fourth layer that I saw something resembling a skintone coming through.

What I learned from this is that painting skin by layering colors on top of each other is far more difficult and time consuming than I'd anticipated. At one point, I actually thought her skin was looking too pink, so I glazed green over it to neutralize it. I even tried glazing blue over it to see what that would do. Anyway, this is how the painting is looking at the time of this post.

You can hear all about my debacle in the video embedded in this post. The last thing I did was glaze some red over it because she was looking kind of gray and red can brighten things. This isn't one of my favorite pieces, but it has to be okay to make less than stellar art. Otherwise you can't do experiments like this. If I insisted on every piece being amazing, I would have to just stick with doing what I know. I might revisit this concept in the future.