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I do fleshtones in two phases, first airbrushing in the basic flesh colors
and then use oil paints to fix up.
A. Mixing flesh tones - I mix 3 different colors for fleshtones:
basic, highlights and shadows. With artist acrylics, the David Fisher formula
is burnt sienna, raw sienna and titanium white, about 1:2:4 in his video. I
found his mixture too red and dark, and 1:3:6 is about right for figures of
real people but still too dark for anime figures. I use this mixture for doing
shadows for anime figures. For anime basic flesh tone I mix apricot (a pinkish
fleshtone), white and yellow ochre, approximately 1:4:1, if the mixture is too
pink cadmium yellow medium is added. For highlights, more white and a little
bit of cadmium yellow medium is added to the mixture. Note that these ratio
are not accurate, I always mess up during mixing and just eyeball the mixture
until I think I've got it.
With model paints such as Mr.Color (which I'm experimenting nowadays because
the peeling problem of artist acrylic is driving me nuts), I mix red, yellow,
white and blue, about 1:3:7:0.03 :) Blue is very tricky to add; if you don't
add it your fleshtone will be too vibrant and looks unreal, too much... you
get a mutant. I think green may be a better replacement for blue since it may
be easier to control. For shadows brown and more blue are added to the mixture,
for highlights more whites. I recommend Mr. base white 1000 for whites if you're
using Gunze Sangyo's line of colors, otherwise you'll be running out of $$$
buying just the white paint because normal whites doesn't cover well. Mr. Base
white is much more opaque and they come in a large jar and don't cost a lot
more.
It's also very important that you mix & paint skin tone in broad daylight.
Under artificial lighting, the mixture will come out with a wrong color (even
with color-corrected lightbulbs), and your shading will be off because artificial
light sources tends to cause less contrast than it actually is.
Disclaimer: Actually I suck at mixing colors so this is just for reference only.
It really helps if you get a picture of the skin tone you want and mix according
to it. Also I have different fleshtones for my figures at different times, and
I'm still experimenting with various mixtures.
[Update 1/01] Nowadays I'm using Gunze yellow orange (#58) and red(#3) and sky
blue(#14?) and Mr. Base white to mix the flesh. The exact ratio again is eyeball,
a start would be 8:1:1:a whole lot, but it depends on what you want to achieve.
I tend to use a redder/pinker flesh for anime characters and a darker/bluer
mixture for life subjects. Gunze's red is very strong so it should be added
very carefully. I actually mix big pots of flesh tones by adding colors to a
jar of Mr. Base White. For the shadow color I mix to the original flesh pot
Earth (#?), which is very close to burnt sienna, and red brown (#?) and more
yellow orange to cancel out the red.
B. Airbrushing - using the basic flesh tone I airbrush in all
areas, more colors for shadow areas and less for highlights. Then grab the shadow
flesh tone and airbrush in the shadow areas. Then I lightly mist the basic flesh
tone over the shadow to blend in the shadow colors. I only do this when I think
the shadow looks too dark and out of place. Then airbrush in highlight fleshtone
for the highlights. It helps to locate these areas if you study pictures of
people ("hey man, it's 10 am and you're already reading babe magazines!"
"I'm only studying flesh tones, leave me alone!"), and know the stop-sign
rule (from Shep Paine's scale figure book) of how lighting interacts with colors.
Also I mess up all the time and doing flesh tone is an iterative process for
me. Finally, I've heard good things about Badger freak-flex premixed flesh colors
but haven't tried it, you can read more about it from Jerry's
page.
[Update 1/01] Now I use a slightly different approach. The problem with the
method above is if you screw up (which happens to me often), fixing is not trivial
because you cannot cover up your mistake. When you airbrush, the underlying
color will show through the top color giving a sense of transparency. But to
re-achieve this effect after a screw up tends to be very difficult. So what
I do now is to airbursh the base flesh tone all over and make sure it uniformlly
and opaquely covers the entire kit. This way, when you screwed up you can wipe
out the mistake with the basic fleshtone and redo the area. Then I do the shadows
and highlights as usual. I use very thin paints for shadows and highlights so
that I can achieve a lot of gradation. Low pressure (~5psi) and thin paint allows
you to draw very fine lines. I also generate more contrast than needed at this
point. Finally I bind all the colors together. At this point you can decide
whether you want a light or dark overall fleshtone by misting a mixture of the
basic and shadow fleshtone. I keep on misting until there are no drastic transitions
in color on the kit, which I consider very important in female skin color.
C. Oil painting - artist oils are very slow drying (days) and
are very workable, and I use them exclusively for doing the final fixes and
touches for my flesh tones. I don't use them on large areas because they leave
brush marks easily, so I try to do as good a job with the airbrush as possible.
But I have hard time getting deep shadows and high highlights (which are crucial
to the figure) to look natural on the figure, so I need oil to fix up these
areas, as well as areas that I have trouble getting correct tones with just
the airbrush (belly & navel area and collar bones are examples of such).
Also I do blushes on the face with oil too, because I usually screw up on it.
How to > Painting