The portrait from the first week was pretty awful. Last night’s was not exactly good, but not nearly as bad. Maybe I’ll post them when I have something a little better to compare them to.

This is the first work I’ve done with portraits or figures in about three years, so I am not surprised that some of my skills have gotten rusty. One skill that has improved, however, is mixing flesh tones. I remember, when I was taking figure painting classes, having a heck of a time getting flesh tones that looked even approximately convincing, even when I could take my time over a multi-session pose of 9 or 12 hours. The poses I’ve been working from lately are only 2.5 hours, but I now find paint mixing to be relatively straightforward.

Because these are pretty short poses, I have not worried too much about getting exactly the right hue, instead choosing to concentrate of value, chroma, and shape. I’m working with a very limited palette in which flesh tones are mixed from lead white, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and raw umber. (I’ve also used some black and some ultramarine for dark hair and background.) The flesh tones are basically convincing, however: others at the session have remarked on it and my wife, who remembers my previous struggles, has mentioned that these flesh tones seem better. I should note that, thus far, the subjects have been Caucasian, although I don’t think I would have any greater trouble painting folks of less pallor.

I’m not sure why this aspect of painting has become easier, except for all the practice I’ve put in mixing still life colors over the last couple of years. The very simple palette seems to help as well.

Now if I can just get the shape of the head down correctly in paint, I’ll be just fine.

Update

7 May 2009: On further reflection, I think that one of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of years, even with a very limited palette, is much better control over chroma. Many artists mix overly intense skin tones. Most people’s skin is very low in chroma. Even when using relatively dull earth colors, you often need to cut the chroma of your mixes to get accurate color. For these portrait studies, I’ve been using raw umber for that purpose, as it’s chroma is very, very low.

Any small grouping of paint colors will do. Here are a few useful limited palettes:

• Burnt sienna and ultramarine blue.
• Raw sienna and ultramarine blue.
• Yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, and black.
• Yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, burnt umber, and black.
• Yellow ochre, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, and black.
• Cadmium red and black.
• Black (and white).
• Black and burnt umber (and white).

(Note that you can substitute a more lightfast pigment for alizarin crimson, such as pyrol ruby.)

As you can see, with these palettes there are hues and chromas that can’t be mixed, only suggested. Often, by using warm/cool contrasts, you can create the impression of colors that aren’t actually there. The classic example is creating the illusion of bright blue eyes using only a mixed grey from black and white, by placing warm yellows, reds, and oranges nearby. Many master figure painters juxtapose warm flesh tones with colors that look cool, but are actually warm/neutral. In doing so they often make deliberate use of a very limited set of paints. Because you are using so few colors, you become intimately familiar with how each of your few paints mixes with each of the others, and how various mixtures work when set against each other.

The lessened range of hue and chroma that are characteristic of a limited palette create a sense of harmony. Each part of the painting is consistent with every other part, and a group of paintings made with the same limited set of colors makes a series that is obviously related. It is harder to achieve realism with a limited palette, but once you are comfortable with a certain set of colors it can be surprising how seldom that seems like a serious limitation.

When selecting the particular paints to use, be aware that not all “raw siennas” are the same. Paints labeled identically by different manufacturers can have radically different masstone, undertone, color mixing, transparency, or other characteristics. That is particularly true with earth colors, which are often really synthetic oxides these days. So if you get used to having ultramarine blue and burnt sienna work beautifully together, you may find that if you switch brands (or even get a different batch) that wonderful balance of color isn’t quite so perfect. If you find a perfect paint, you may want to get an extra couple of tubes, because that perfection may not be available forever.

One way to choose paint is to use what I will call a “color theory” palette. Such a palette is characterized by a limited number of paints (usually, but not always, between three and six—plus white). These colors are usually selected for high chroma, without regard to value. Their hues are distributed as evenly as possible around the color circle. Color theory palettes vary in how many colors are used and the particular distribution (color space) over which the colors are selected. They can involve a lot of experimentation to find exactly the “right” pigment to fit into a particular theoretical slot. Color theory palette aficionados may agonize over which pigment is just the right middle yellow, for example.

One simple color theory palette uses the traditional primary triad colors: red, yellow, and blue. Intermediate hues are obtained by mixing two primaries. A green is mixed with yellow and blue, for example. Mixtures are lightened with white and darkened or neutralized with mixtures of complementaries. Another simple color theory palette uses the printer’s three primary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. A CMY palette (if the pigments are selected correctly) is distributed a bit more evenly around the color circle than the RYB palette.

Either of these palettes can be used to mix just about any hue. Because (almost all) mixtures reduce chroma, they are very limited in which high-chroma colors can be mixed. Because the highest-chroma pigments have very different values, mixing the desired value can also be a challenge. Additionally, because all colors must be mixed from only three, you will probably find yourself doing a heck of a lot of mixing. The advantage to these palettes is that, with only three colors, you eventually learn their properties (however limited) very, very well.

Another approach is to use one each of the four “artist’s primaries.” This method raises green up from a mere complementary to a true primary, so the palette has red, yellow, blue, and green.

There are color theory palettes that involve more than just a three or four pigments. Another approach is to simply have one color for each of the six traditional primary and secondary colors (a “ROYGBV” palette). Yet another is to take each of the artist primary colors and split them into two, one of which is biased toward one of the two secondaries next to that primary, the other of which is biased toward the other of those secondaries. For example, the two secondaries next to blue are violet and green. So you would select a violet blue and a green blue. You’d then find an orange red, a violet red, a green yellow, and an orange yellow, for a total of six paints on your palette. The idea is that this split primary palette makes it easier to hit particular hue/chroma combinations than just a three color palette. And of course it does, to a degree.

One of the big proponents of the split primary palette approach is Michael Wilcox, author of “Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green.” (His point with the title is that there are no pure primaries, and if there were they would only mix to black.) I find Wilcox hard to take seriously because I simply hate the way he writes. He has an irritatingly smarmy, superior, slappable writing style. He repeats himself over and over. And he doesn’t know the difference. Between a grammatical sentence. And one that is not.

Wilcox recommends two biased pigments for each of the traditional primaries (cadmium red light, quinacridone violet, cadmium yellow light, hansa yellow light, cerulean blue, and ultramarine blue). He also adds five other pigments (plus white) to his recommended palette for no theoretical reason, just because he likes them (pthalo blue, pthalo green, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, raw sienna, and titanium white). Bruce MacEvoy has an excellent criticism of Wilcox’s book, which largely comes down to three points: (1) Wilcox represents his theory as new, but it really rehashes color theories from the middle of the 19th century; (2) he misrepresents the nature of how colors reflect off of pigments; and (3) his pigment choices are not very well distributed around a hue circle. MacEvoy also has a bit to say about split primary palettes in general.

Yet another variant is to use the CMY printer’s primary palette and then add a secondary pigment in between each of them: this palette would have yellow, green, cyan, blue violet, magenta, and red orange, all distributed quite evenly around the hue circle. If I were a color theory palette person, that’s the one I’d probably use, because it’s the one that most accurately reflects actual color and the limitations of actual color mixing.

Plenty of artists successfully use a palette based on one of these approaches. With proper selection of paints, a color theory palette can be useful and flexible. The two problems with such palettes are (1) some high-chroma colors may not be obtainable; and (2) darkening and neutralizing high chroma pigments using only complementary mixtures can be an exercise in frustration, with continual re-mixing to manage hue shifts and saturation costs.