Question: Mixing skin tones for portraying BIPOC in watercolour

[mekare]

I want to portray more people of colour this year (next project is Michael Burnham from ST Discovery) and wanted to ask if anyone can share either their own experiences with specific art pieces (mific?) or tutorials.

The tutorials I found so far were for white skin tones only, like this one: How to mix realistic flesh colors.

Comments

[amberdreams]

This might be useful for a range of options to use for different skin types
https://youtu.be/m0hZ-36cSZU

[mekare]

Thank you, I just started watching and it looks very helpful. I don‘t have many of the colours she mentions but I‘ll just go with the next best alternative. I noticed that I don‘t have a cool red, so that‘s on my list for the next art supplies order.

[syntheid]

So particularly with darker skin tones and watercolor, I was struggling to find references on how to achieve keeping watercolor's luminosity and inserting color variance for lively skin that people often get in pale skin without also washing out darker skin tones. I experimented with charging and glazing, and what I was liking better was laying an underpainting of a warmer tone and glazing over that with a darker, cooler tone so the warmth shines through. Doing it the other way seems to result in more muddy colors. Charging works more I think on the under layer to set wider areas of like blush or shadow, but also is dependent on the paper used to disperse in the way you expect (a lot of my paper doesn't seem to handle charging well and will end up with blotchy looks that are not good for skin). Here's an example of what I mean about doing a warm underpainting with dark overlay. This is actually what I started with, but you can see the right side of the chin looks kind of muddy because I attempted to layer light over dark (same colors as the other picture btw, but slightly different ratio mixes), and it kind of just ended up greenish because the dark tone is shining through the light rather than the other way around. The rest of the face I ended up trying just layering multiple layers of the same warm brown and that can also look alright, but I prefer a bit more variance in my portraits. And I was also struggling with not being able to go dark enough with that, so that technique works better with medium skin tones.

Color variance is still important for making darker skin look lively, but you'll generally be using warmer purples instead of blue-greys as shadow tones generally (very very dark skin can have more of a bluish tint, but most mid-range to medium-dark is warmer).

And I don't remember where I saw this tip but darker skin is more reflective so there's going to be more contrast. You will have a wider light to shadow range than you do in very pale skin, so don't be afraid of both very dark shadows and very bright highlights. One tip used in photographing very dark skin to get more visibility on camera is to use colored lights and this can also be fun to play with in painting to give people like hot pink or blue highlights if you don't want to use white, too.

eta: I forgot to talk about the actual mixing sorry, but it depends a bit on the technique. With the glazing I like to do more orangey/brown bases, the one I linked to I was using a very reddish-orange mix of a warm red and warm yellow and the dark layer is indigo with a bit of burnt umber to warm/neutralize it. For a single layer I might use a sienna or umber either with red to warm it for redder areas or a bit of a blue to neutralize it into a more purple color to use for cooler areas.

[minoanmiss]

*copies down*

[mekare]

This is super helpful, thank you! Also now I know new words for watercolor techniques (I wasn‘t familiar with charging and glazing - though I have done both).

[yhlee]

For watercolor, I found this Kirsty Partridge YouTube tutorial (in which she paints a portrait of a Black woman) to be helpful. I used those techniques for this portrait of Uhura from original Star Trek.

[mekare]

Wow that tutorial is amazing, I'm definitely going to use it for my Michael portrait. Now I just wish she had told us which colours she was using because Michael‘s skintone is very similar!

[mific]

Yeah, unfortunately she just lists the paints as the Cotman watercolour set. There aren't many colours in that set so she must have hand-mixed all the ones she used.

[minoanmiss]

I knew there had to be a couple of discussions on Tumblr, and I found some of them:

https://rubynye.tumblr.com/post/190169814146/how-to-draw-black-people-2019-how-to-draw-black

https://merfilly.tumblr.com/post/623154155347902464/mel-lion-so-you-might-be-saying-lion-why-a

and one about Asian people covering similar topics of color and shading:

https://rubynye.tumblr.com/post/634967965231693824

[mekare]

Thank you so much! Esp. for that last tutorial. I mainly draw Chinese ppl for fandoms but want to branch out. Asian is such a not-useful term, lol. Just try to compare a Pakistani person with a Japanese person. Even within China there is variation - not surprising in such a huge country.

[minoanmiss]

'ASian' is a truly non-useful term, 'tis true.