Flesh tones

Creating flesh tones is difficult, especially for people of color.

Most flesh tone tutorials or other resources relating to flesh tones simply look off. It is difficult to get a wide range of colors the first time mixing them (or even the second and third).

Damali Ayo took on the challenge of creating flesh tone colors.

The trick to creating flesh tone colors is to limit yourself concerning colors. Even green can be used to create a desired tone. Of course, there is no specific color for combination of colors for a skin tone. Even so, there can be some general rules to follow when it comes to skin tones. Courtesy of painter Monique Simoneau, here are some good rules of thumb when creating skin colors:

1. Titanium white
2. Cadmium Red Light
3. Cadmium Yellow Medium
4. Yellow Ochre
5. Burnt Sienna
6. Burnt Umber
7. Ultramarine Blue.

For light flesh tones use colors 1, 2, 3, and 5.
For medium flesh tones use 2, 3, 4 and 5.
For dark flesh tones use 2, 5, 6 and 7.

As you can see with the darkest flesh tone, both ultramarine blue and cadmium red light are mixed on/in the same palate. Interestingly, a non-spectral violet (purple) is similarly used to create evening skies and other darker elements. This then makes perfect sense to see how purple is created and used to to create flesh tones.