Sometimes I get asked how to do skintones when painting.
I will try to explain with the help of Not Nearly Naked Enough Castiel…
So the actual color of skin comes from keratin, which is approximately the color of your bitten-off fingernail (sort of a translucent barely-yellow). It doesn’t really matter what your race is. Different pigments reflect and absorb light differently, and a blue lamp is going to make you look blue. But keratin is the same. That’s why human skin (and even animal skin) is all a “flesh tone.” It’s the same stuff.
So the rules of skin color are pretty much the same no matter your race or the lighting in the room: the thinner the skin, the richer the color. That’s because what skin does is to separate the outside from the inside, and everything on your inside is bloody. So the thinner the skin, the more blood we’re seeing.
And most humans (most humans) have red blood. So if you take the keratin and the blood and put them together, you get a basic scale of color: barely-yellow to blood red. Anywhere in there is skin color on any person. Your race (and the amount of melanin in your skin) just makes it lighter or darker, but the scale is the same.
The actual colors on any individual face are a factor of skin thickness and how close the blood lies to the surface of the skin. So if you know someone’s basic skin color (for example, that they’re Caucasian with a surfer’s tan), then you can use the scale of barely-yellow to blood red to determine the colors of highlights and shadows while painting.
I took eyedrop samples of Not Nearly Naked Enough Castiel’s face to demonstrate what I mean:
- Thicker skin (the end of your nose, your eyebrow, the corners of your mouth, and your ear) appears dull and barely-yellow. It reflects the most light and looks almost white in some places. We can’t see any blood red underneath.
- Medium skin (your forehead, cheeks, and neck) appears a somewhat richer orange. It reflects some light but also allows some light to pass through the skin so we can see a little bit of the blood red.
- Thin skin (your lips, nostrils, and eyelids) appears deep red. It reflects the least amount of light and allows the most light to pass through. These are the bits that look super cherry-colored when you’re out in the cold. The blood is very close to the surface of the skin.
If you had darker skin, or if the lighting was different, the idea would be the same: thicker skin would appear dull and more opaque (barely-yellow) and would reflect more light, whereas thin skin would appear darker and richer (blood red) because blood is closer to the surface.A general rule of thumb that I use to paint skin colors is this: (1) a lot of dull yellow, (2) a medium amount of orange, and (3) a little bit of deep red. If you pick the medium color first, then it’s easier to pick the yellow and the red from there. And it works with any skin tone in any lighting—you just have to adjust accordingly.
Watch out for hair and stubble, though. Stubble is hair, and hair is pure keratin, which means there’s no blood at all. Stubble can make skin look dull (and sometimes appear grayish).
Woooooot.
And tbh, I don’t even know if that will help anyone, but at least now you have some Cas on your dash.