Oils for Skintones

There are a few articles online, though I learned to paint in oils before the internet came along, so I'm not sure where they are. You might try some of the tutorials HERE. I'm sure others here can guide you to some fine online tutorials. I'll have one on my own site eventually, but I don't have it there yet.

 Personally, I like the natural sheen of oils. The trick is to spread the paint as thinly as possible, while still attaining good coverage. That helps it dry faster and it also dries to a more dull sheen. Skin actually has sheen, so I feel that oils give skin tones a natural, skinlike feel. You can clear coat it, but becareful not to make it too flat. You'll notice that your skin doesn't have a layer of dullcote over it.

You can attain good skin tones with a basic set of paints. Titanium White, Gold Ochre (or Yellow Ochre, if you can't find Gold Ochre), Burnt Umber, Burnt Seinna and maybe Cadmium Yellow and Cadmium Red. Blue Black, and French Ultra-Marine Blue are also useful. My mixtures are a little more complex than that, but the resulting tones aren't all that different really.

You might do a little poking around here, with the search function. The subject of painting with oils has been discussed many times, and there's a wealth of info right here that might be useful to you as well.

testors modelmaster line has a line of skintone paints

not oils but i thought it might help

Thanks Plymonkey and DURR,

I've taken a look at those tutorials and they're most interesting. I guess the techniques follow a pretty logical sequence and the idea is to get the feel of the blending and go with the method. I was most interested in the feature on skintones in enamels, I'd need only two additional shades to try that approach. By the looks of it, most of the artists posting there were working at large scale, so 1:35 is going to be a scale-down of the techniques, probably fewer zones of both highlight and shadow progressing from the basecoat. It'll be most interesting to see how this turns out, whether in oils or enamels, or both.

Many thanks,

TB379

i watched a demo at our model club on this the other week

the colours used there were

burnt umber

burnt seinna

yellow

light olive green

flesh tone

white

and the results were amazing

started of with flesh tone mixed with with umber ans sienna then lighten with the other colours

was really good

hope it helps :)