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Choosing the best colours to create skin tones in your watercolour painting can seem a daunting task.

Seldom does a watercolour paint set provide a sensible colour to use as a realistic skin tone. Fair enough considering the wondrous variety of skin tones we come across in real life.

So the best bet is to feel comfortable working out how to mix appropriate skin tones in watercolour.

Let’s get started doing just that in this article.

Is Getting the Perfect Skin Colour for Your Painting Important?

Honestly, it is far less important than you think to get an ideal colour for skin tones. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, there is a myriad of skin tones out in the world so it is next to impossible to expect to find a perfect skin tone (premixed in tubes or pans) for your project.

Secondly, our bodies are very shapely and that means they are very reflective of the lights and colours around them. Skin is thinner is some areas than others making it appear paler there.

Extremities like noses, ears and finger tips have plenty of capillaries close to the skin’s surface, making these areas appear warmer (more pink/red). Let watercolour do most of the work and drop in a rosy tone (like Rose Madder) and let the colours blend naturally or glaze in a layer over the dry base if need be.

The many shapely contours of human faces and bodies mean that there will be plenty of shadows and highlights. That means there will be many variations in a single person’s skin tones at any given time.

With watercolour, we are lucky. The highlights are already there - the white of the paper for the very extremes, and very pale translucent washes of our base colour for rest of the lighter areas. Then we can add a cooler transparent layer over the dry base (or mix wet in wet) in the shadow areas. I favour purples but ultramarine and other blues and even greens will do will do.

Yes, purples, greens and blues are useful for skin tones too.

You will be surprised at how easily we can get skin to read as skin. Colour is not as important as value in communicating any subject including human skin.

(Value refers to the darkness or lightness of a colour. Click here if you would like to read a bit more about that.)

So let’s figure out what sort of colours you can use as your base colour for skin tones in watercolour paintings.

Paint Colours to use as a Base for Light Skin Tones

Since I most often paint my own family, this is the skin tone I have the most experience with. I find that when painting a pale skinned person, you might want to start with a peachy orange.

Now unless you are painting an Oompah Loompah, you will likely find this a little too vibrant to feel realistic, but there is an easy fix. Adding a drop of colour from the opposite side of the colour wheel will neutralise the vibrancy and make it something that appears slightly more natural. For an orange/peach colour that means adding a drop of blue or purple to mute the colour into the range of something a little more realistic.

Keeping the colour fairly light by using more water in the paint-water ratio can be a good way to go. It is easier to darken watercolour by adding more pigment than it is to lighten it. Not impossible, you can always blot, or lift out paint - watercolour is more forgiving than people give it credit for.

If you don’t have an orange in your palette, you probably have a red. Something like a Cadmium Red is a surprisingly good choice. If you dilute Cadmium Red you will find it is not pink, but more of a coral/peach. (This popular blog post about colour mixing will explain exactly why that is.)

I’ll include links to the paint colours for your convenience so you can see exactly what colours I am talking about. They are affiliate links, so thank you in advance if you end up purchasing from one of those links (at no extra cost to you) 🤗.

The colours I tend to use most in my palette for these paler skins are Naples Yellow Reddish and Burnt Sienna.

Naples Yellow Reddish (mine happens to be Schmincke brand) is a good pale base but it is rather more opaque than many watercolour paints. Sometimes that is a good thing, sometimes not. As long as you know what you are working with you can make the best choices for your project.

Burnt Sienna might seem like way too dark a colour for pale skin, but again with lots of water in the mix, its pale version makes for a useful skin approximation in my experience. And for some of the darker shadow areas of the skin, more concentrated burnt sienna can be just right.

When I was testing out the colours in my palette I painted little swatches of the various possibilities for skin tones. I dropped in pinks to warm up the colour in some areas, or purples to create shadowy areas in my test patches.

Once those test patches were dry I couldn’t resist getting out the coloured pencils and finding little faces in the swatches. So much fun! But I hope it also gives you some context.

It can be hard to imagine the colour in the faces, arms and legs in your painting and it can leave you wondering if it will be a good choice for the skin tones. I hope that my little doodled faces make it easier to see that these desaturated warm tones are what you need to paint people.

Test out the colours you have in your palette in dilute and concentrated mixes so that you are well placed to make good choices in your portrait painting.

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Paint Colours to use as a Base for Medium, Golden Toned Skins

Unsurprisingly, for the more golden skin tones I suggest starting with a base that leans more towards yellow.

Raw sienna (my Raw Sienna is from Holbein), yellow ochre (my yellow ochre also happens to be Holbein or something similar would be good choices. Again these warm colours are getting us in the right ball park, but may need a touch of purple to neutralise them to give them a more natural feel.

Two of my favourite purples (okay all purples are my favourite 😅) are Dioxazine Violet from Cotmans and Moonglow from Daniel Smith. Moonglow is a purple that is quite desaturated, tending more towards grey, whereas the dioxasine violet is a brighter purple. If you have multiple purples available try desaturating your yellows and oranges with each one to discover your new favourite skin tone combination.

With all the skin tones, don’t forget that those rosy areas will need to be warmed up with a pink tone. I like to drop in a little Rose Madder for a nice rosy blush on the cheek of any skin tone. If the paint in the base layer is still damp you will hopefully get a nice smooth natural blend of the colours.

A drop of this rosy colour can also be useful to warm up a yellow ochre base that feels unnatural. Mix up nice big puddles of the colour you like before you start your painting so that you don’t have to keep remixing to complete the figure.

Paint Colours to use as a Base for Darker Toned Skins

For darker skin tones I like to start with a base of Burnt sienna or Burnt Umber umber and add a nice deep purple to neutralise and or add shadows. You may find some brands of Indian Red to be good rich dark colour to start with.

The Indian Red (from Schmincke) in my palette is a wonderful rich colour, but it is quite opaque and a very bossy colour in that it will whoosh into all the other colours quite aggressively. When painting figures this can be a little harrowing!

It might be better to test out your paints not only for the colour, but for their other properties like granulation or the ‘whoosh’ (one imagines there is a more technical term for this, but I’m guessing you know what I mean.)

You want the paint to support you in your figure painting journey, not give you more problems to solve. That said, I do love this colour - once you know what to expect you can work with the properties of the pigments and make the most of them.

You may need to lighten a very dark dark colour with a touch of yellow ochre or burnt sienna, or warm a deep brown with some rose madder. Deep blues and purples (I used Dioxazine Violet from Cotmans) will be useful for shadows.

It’s a question of experimentation with your existing palette to find colours that look right to you.

Always remember that skin tones are far more forgiving than you may realise and that you will find that the viewer’s eye readily accepts the colours you choose if the values are correct.

I hope these tips are helpful to you in making some good choices for your next watercolour figure painting.

Happy paint mixing!🌈

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