Painting Beautiful Skin Tones with Color & Light

Book excerpt: LEARNING HOW TO CAPTURE SUCH QUALITY HAS NEVER BEEN EASIER!Inside you'll find guidelines for rendering accurate skin tones in a variety of media, including watercolor, oil and pastel. You'll begin with a review of the five essential painting elements (drawing, value, color, composition and edges), then learn how light and color influence the appearance of skin tones. Best-selling artist Chris Saper provides the advice and examples that make every lesson and technique easy to understandâ€"immediately improving the quality of your work. You'll discover how to: • Paint the four major skin color groups (Caucasian, African American, Asian, and Hispanic) • Refine these colors into dozens of possible variations within each group • Select your palette and mix hues for clean, beautiful colors • Determine the color and temperature of light that falls on your subject • Paint direct and indirect sunlight, artificial light and highlights of light • Master the four elements that determine color in shadow • Use photographic references when you can't paint directly from life You'll also find seven step-by-step demonstrations and an appendix of sample color charts for each major skin type under a range of lighting variations. It's all you need to bring your portraits to life!