Mix It Up

Oil painter Adele Wagstaff guides you through mixing a colour palet te to create perfect flesh tones

- Adele Wagstaff

My portrait of Beth (above) demonstrates the compositional format of a number of my recent portrait paintings with the focus on the face, a direct gaze and the edges of the canvas cropping the space around the head. It also shows the muted palette that I used to create them.

I mostly work with a small number of sitters for my portraits, which I then paint over and over again. Some of these regular models have very pale complexions with red hair, and the paleness of the sitters’ skin enables me to see more colours in the flesh and explore the cool lemons, blues, greens and mauves.

Through careful mixing, the skin’s lighter tones and colours, and the muted warm greys within the composition, have all been made from a limited palette of warm and cool primary colours and white.

THE PALETTE

When working with a model, whether they have very pale, cool skin or darker, warmer skin colours, I tend to use the same colour palette. The order the colours are placed on the palette also usually tends to be the same.

The whites are Titanium White or Flake White. If you are unable to buy Flake White, Michael Harding now produces Warm White, which is a lead white alternative. Lead whites are warmer whites when compared to Titanium or Zinc White.

The colours are laid on the palette moving from light to dark with two yellows, two reds and two blues following on from the white. Cadmium Lemon or Lemon Yellow, Cerulean Blue and Alizarin Crimson are the cool primaries, while Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Red and Ultramarine are the warm primary colours.