Painting The Figure

The topic of this article was sparked by a reader's plea: "How on earth do I mix flesh colours?"

Here's a promise:
Unless commissioned to illustrate a medical textbook, you will never be called upon to paint human flesh.

Now, unless you're a vegan, or have never been in a kitchen, you already know the colours of flesh. You've seen the gray/white through pink to blood red of fish, fowl and red meats - all stripped of their skin. But even in a Life class, your models will be wearing their skins.

So, it's skin - not flesh - you'll be painting. Does that make it sound less daunting? Well, be warned. A limp fillet of raw flesh, lying flat and featureless on a chopping board, is a doddle to paint. Skin, however, covers a shape with myriad curves and hollows. It reflects light where the underlying structure bulges into a forehead or juts into a nose.

Further, that light may be cool or warm, depending on its source. In the depressions of an eye socket or the inside of an elbow, delicate shadows reveal the shapes. On top of all that, the "local" tone of your subjects' skin will vary immensely. And there's more: You'll need to be aware of those areas where the blood flows close to the surface, casting a rosy glow over the ears, nose, neck and so on.

Enough of the frighteners. Here's the basic fact that will keep you on track:

All of us are coloured in some variation of orange-brown. To us painters, that means Burnt Sienna. From the translucent "white" of a Nicole Kidman, through the "yellow" of a Chinese, to the "black" of a Melanesian, it's only a matter of adding White to lighten or Cobalt Blue to darken the basic Burnt Sienna. (I prefer Cobalt Blue in these mixtures because it is cooler and more opaque than Ultramarine. I never use Thalo Blue because I find it too strong for any skin tone I've ever seen.)

And there are two methods of tackling the challenge of painting people. The first is alla prima, the direct laying down of paint in one application, without using glazing or scumbling techniques. It is chosen by a majority of painters because it seems simpler. But when a painter is inexperienced in rendering the figure, this method can all too often lead to a "muddy" result as the shadow colours are blended - or over-blended - into the wet paint.

So, if you choose this method and are not supremely confident of your brushwork, I strongly recommend laying your shading on the nearly dry figure with glazes. A glaze is simply a small amount of transparent pigment carried in a glazing medium. Some examples of transparent pigment are Viridian Green, Ultramarine, Alizarin Crimson, Raw Sienna and so on. Glaze mediums have entire recipe books to themselves but a reliable alternative is Windsor & Newton's Liquin, modified with distilled turps. Experiment until you find the mix that suits your style. The thing to remember is not to dilute the medium so much that it becomes too weak to achieve a good adherence.

I've mentioned (nagged!) before that good figure painting relies on good figure drawing, so I'll assume you've done your homework and have checked and rechecked proportions as you made the sketch for your painting. You'll have done this in a thin mix of Raw Umber and turps, very easy to adjust as you go along. Now you can take a step that will be an invaluable help in keeping the three dimensional quality of your subject.

With a thin mix of Burnt Sienna - don't worry that it looks like a so-called "Red" Indian at this point - loosely model the structure of your subject, shading the hollows and wiping out the main highlights.