Skin frightens beginners more than any other subject, and the usual advice makes it worse: buy a flesh tint, follow a chart, memorise a formula. None of that survives contact with a real face, because skin is not one colour but a family of related ones, and the family has a fairly simple shape.

Read skin before you mix it

All skin, whatever its depth, is a low-chroma orange. The hue barely moves. What changes between a pale face and a deep one is mostly value (how dark) and a little chroma (how far from grey). What changes between the light side of a face and the shadow side is the same two things again, plus a shift cooler in the shadow. So the job is mostly about landing the value and the chroma and then adjusting the temperature, rather than finding one right red or one right yellow.

That is why the palettes that are good at skin are the dull ones. Yellow ochre is a desaturated yellow, ivory black is a desaturated blue, and cadmium red light is the only saturated note. Between them they cover the flesh family without ever passing through a colour that is too bright to be skin.

Six notes, two palettes

The recipes below were computed with Halftint's engine for two palettes. The Zorn palette is yellow ochre, cadmium red light, ivory black and titanium white. The six-tube beginner palette is titanium white, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium red medium, alizarin crimson, ultramarine and burnt sienna. Parts are knife-loads. The number on each card is the distance between the target and what the rounded parts make, in OKLab units times 100; under 3 reads as a match.

Light skin

Light skin in light, Zorn palette

ΔE 0.6
  1. 1 part Yellow Ochre
  2. 7 parts Titanium White
  3. 2 parts Cadmium Red Light
  4. 1 part Ivory Black

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Light skin in light, six-tube palette

ΔE 6.2
  1. 4 parts Titanium White
  2. 2 parts Cadmium Yellow Medium
  3. 1 part Alizarin Crimson strong tinter

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Light skin half-tint, Zorn palette

ΔE 4.2
  1. 2 parts Yellow Ochre
  2. 2 parts Titanium White
  3. 1 part Cadmium Red Light

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Light skin half-tint, six-tube palette

ΔE 4.9
  1. 5 parts Titanium White
  2. 3 parts Cadmium Yellow Medium
  3. 2 parts Alizarin Crimson strong tinter

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

The Zorn recipes are mostly white with ochre and red as seasoning, and a speck of black to dull them. The six-tube palette does less well on pale skin in the engine's model: with no earth yellow, it has to dull cadmium yellow with alizarin and the result stays a little too clean. This is the concrete case for owning yellow ochre if you paint people.

Medium skin

Medium skin, Zorn palette

ΔE 2.3
  1. 6 parts Yellow Ochre
  2. 4 parts Titanium White
  3. 3 parts Cadmium Red Light
  4. 2 parts Ivory Black

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Medium skin, six-tube palette

ΔE 2.2
  1. 5 parts Titanium White
  2. 4 parts Cadmium Yellow Medium
  3. 2 parts Ultramarine Blue
  4. 3 parts Alizarin Crimson strong tinter

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Medium skin in shadow, Zorn palette

ΔE 2.3
  1. 2 parts Yellow Ochre
  2. 2 parts Cadmium Red Light
  3. 1 part Titanium White
  4. 2 parts Ivory Black

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Medium skin in shadow, six-tube palette

ΔE 0.5
  1. 3 parts Titanium White
  2. 3 parts Cadmium Yellow Medium
  3. 3 parts Cadmium Red Medium
  4. 4 parts Ultramarine Blue
  5. 2 parts Alizarin Crimson strong tinter

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Look at what happens between light and shadow on the six-tube palette: the shadow recipe brings in ultramarine and drops most of the white. Shadow on skin is cooler and duller as well as darker, and the blue is doing both of those jobs.

Deep skin

Deep skin in light, Zorn palette

ΔE 1.1
  1. 2 parts Yellow Ochre
  2. 2 parts Cadmium Red Light
  3. 1 part Titanium White
  4. 2 parts Ivory Black

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Deep skin in light, six-tube palette

ΔE 0.9
  1. 3 parts Cadmium Red Medium
  2. 2 parts Cadmium Yellow Medium
  3. 2 parts Titanium White
  4. 3 parts Ultramarine Blue

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Deep skin in shadow, Zorn palette

ΔE 1
  1. 1 part Yellow Ochre
  2. 2 parts Cadmium Red Light
  3. 2 parts Ivory Black

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Deep skin in shadow, six-tube palette

ΔE 3.1
  1. 3 parts Burnt Sienna
  2. 2 parts Cadmium Red Medium
  3. 1 part Cadmium Yellow Medium
  4. 1 part Titanium White
  5. 2 parts Ultramarine Blue

Target on the left, the colour these parts make on the right. Add in the order listed, strongest pigment last.

Deep skin has more chroma than people expect, especially in the light. The mistake is reaching for brown or black to darken a light-skin mix; that gives mud. The recipes above start from red and build down, with the burnt sienna or ochre supplying the warmth and the blue or black supplying the depth.

A working method

  • Mix the half-tint first. The colour between light and shadow is the one that appears most on a face. Get it right, then make the light by adding white and a touch of yellow, and the shadow by adding the cool dulling colour, not by adding black alone.
  • Judge against the canvas, not the palette. A correct skin mix looks like dirty orange on a white palette. It looks like skin next to the background.
  • Keep the strings. Mix a light, a half-tint and a shadow for each face before you start, as three piles, and pull from them. Matching a note twice mid-painting is how sittings run out of time.

The targets above are examples. Real skin is whatever is in front of you, and the way to get that is to sample it: Halftint can take the colour straight from a reference photo and compute the recipe for the tubes you own, then tell you what to add when the pile drifts.