Colour and light study
It's from a copyrighted reference photo, so I can't actually use it for anything, but I couldn't resist painting this one.
Trying to learn more about the colour depth of dark skin. The magic of light skin is all in the subsurface scattering. The magic of dark skin is in the specular, the reflectance. It picks up all the colours of the light around it. Here, I was finding myself using colours from all spokes of the wheel in a different way than I usually do. A rich red undertone - that's the same way you work with chalk pastel, layering on a red-brown undertone and blending lighter colours over top of it. But instead of warmth in the lighted areas, here it blends to violet and blue. The brightest sunlit areas are ringed with pale yellow instead of coral. It wasn't intuitive. Still, I think it came out pretty alright.
Trying to learn more about the colour depth of dark skin. The magic of light skin is all in the subsurface scattering. The magic of dark skin is in the specular, the reflectance. It picks up all the colours of the light around it. Here, I was finding myself using colours from all spokes of the wheel in a different way than I usually do. A rich red undertone - that's the same way you work with chalk pastel, layering on a red-brown undertone and blending lighter colours over top of it. But instead of warmth in the lighted areas, here it blends to violet and blue. The brightest sunlit areas are ringed with pale yellow instead of coral. It wasn't intuitive. Still, I think it came out pretty alright.