Brown + White Is a Corpse. Mix Skin Tones Like This Instead., by Milan Art Institute on YouTube. 21 min 12 s.
- Video length
- 21 min 12 s
- Time to do it
- 45 minutes
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Steps
- 9
What you need
Steps
Stop mixing raw umber with white for skin. That flat brown reads as dead on a face. Instead, build your flesh base from a complementary pair.
Mix a pinky red with a touch of green and white. This gives a brown that looks alive. Yellow with violet, or orange with blue, does the same job.
Lay out your palette the same way every session. Keep warm colors on one side and cool colors on the other so you never hunt for a peachy warm or a cool violet.
Load a fresh color on the brush for each stroke. Do not mix three big piles and spread them over the whole face. Keep a clean brush and wipe it on a rag when it gets dirty.
Work over a dry subtractive oil underpainting. Paint back to front and from big brush to small, covering the whole canvas in layers rather than finishing one square inch at a time.
Place warm and cool strokes next to each other on the cheek. Cools recede and warms come forward, so a cheekbone comes out and the crack of the nose sinks back with paint alone.
Stack brush strokes and let the eye blend them. Avoid the stab and dab habit of mushing wet paint together, which turns skin to mud.
Keep far edges soft from the first layer. Make edges sharp up close and blurrier as they recede, because the eye reads a sharp edge as close.
If a passage turns muddy, wipe it out with a rag and solvent and start again. Oil paint stays workable, so nothing is ruined.
Tips and common mistakes
A dirty brush is one of the fastest ways to turn skin tones to mud, so keep several clean ones within reach.
Leave your brush strokes visible instead of smoothing them. Stacked strokes look more alive than blended ones.
Set your palette layout once and repeat it every session so mixing becomes automatic.
Work the whole canvas in layers rather than perfecting one small area first.
Questions
Why does brown plus white look like a corpse?
Raw umber and white make a flat, grayish brown with no warmth or variation. Real skin is built from many warm and cool shifts, so a single brown mix reads as dead.
Do I need a dry underpainting to start?
It helps. The method is shown over a dry subtractive oil underpainting, which gives you a base to paint into without the layers mixing into mud.
What solvent can I use to wipe out mistakes?
The video names Soythin, a solvent made from soybeans. Use it in a ventilated room and follow the label safety instructions.
This guide was drafted from the video's details and general task knowledge. It has not been checked against the full video. Check the video and relevant product instructions before following a procedure. Report a correction.
