A dear friend and my favourite artist asked me how I rendered my skin tones so I thought I would put a kind of tutorial together.

This is a self portrait and is an under painting at this stage.

I use burnt umber for most of my under paintings. The under painting stage (for those that do not know) is to seal the sketch to the canvas so that the pencil does not smudge into the colours when painting and allows for the application of crisp and strong colours that are not made dirty by pencil smudges.

At this stage of the painting I go right in and establish the light and dark areas right away. For me, it is really important for my eye to see exactly where the darkest darks and the lightest lights are. I make a thinned down wash of burnt umber to gently establish the light and mid shades in the skin tone. For the hair I make sure I show where the darks and the highlights are as well. Then I move right into the background to show where I want the light source and how I want the background to move and feel. I generally like to have the really dark areas at the corners which gives a great sense of depth and space.

Will post the stages as I complete them. Hopefully this tutorial will be useful and helpful to others.