vivvz:marta, I have a question, when you add shadows to
your faces, do you first paint it monochromatic and then add color or
do you add color from the start? and how do you keep the colors crisp?
every time I try it, the colors turn out all muddy and it just doesn't
look good : / help?
Hey!
I start with colours. I tried the monochromatic technique but to be honest I could never get my skin tones make look good that way. If you wanna try this technique, I advise you turn to Henning Ludvigsen - he can do wonders with this workflow. :)
As for preventing your colours looking muddy, I'd advise a few things:
- Firstly, avoid unsaturated colours.
- Secondly, if you work with highly transparent brushes, pick colours which are slightly more saturated from what you'd desire. That way you will not lose their lively look when applying them subtly onto the canvas.
- Lastly, mind composing colours in the palette in a way that shadows and highlights are of a different hue. For example, keep an orange-ish midtone, purple-ish shadow and a cold (greenish, bluish or lemon-yellow) highlight.
And one more tip: keep your background colours lightly saturated, too. The background colour can often greatly influence your colour choices, so for the first few tries, try to keep it quite saturated but still "natural" looking, i.e. choose khaki greens, browns, oranges. That is to say - avoid colours which do not contribute to natural skintones,i.e. very intense shades of blue, green, red etc.
Whew, hope it helps. If you need anythin else, please let me know! :-)
