Watercolor Tutorial: how to make watercolor skin tones easily

Learn how to create different skin tones in watercolor with the painter and teacher Ale Casanova

Watercolor is one of the most versatile painting techniques, as it opens a wide range of possibilities for the handling of color and light. Therefore, it is ideal to experiment in an agile way the adventure of painting human figures.

Undoubtedly, one of the most important challenges when it comes to illustrating this type of shapes is to get the right skin color. Ale Casanova (@casanova_ale), painter and teacher, shares with you some tips that will help you create different shades starting from colors you never imagined you could use. Enjoy them in the following video!

1. There is no such thing as flesh color

The first thing you should know is that color is a convention created by human beings in order to understand the world, so when you work on portraits, you can actually use any color to get a huge variety of skin tones.

2. Dark skin

It is advisable to handle shadows in purple and bluish shades, and highlights in orange tones. Try a mix of ultramarine blue and purple for the base of the skin, and cadmium red for the highlights. To create reinforcing lines and contrast, try violet tones and create tonal multiplicity.

3. Light skin

Start by outlining the areas where you want less light with blue. Then, use cadmium red to create the intersections and features, and yellow for the areas with more light. Finally, use light cobalt to mark volumes.

4. Very light skin

Create the base using neon pink, then mix that color with yellow and use the result to highlight light shadows. Finally, use green and turquoise blue to highlight more intense shadow details. Anchor points and highlights look good in shades of violet.

If you liked this tutorial and want to learn with him to study the different color palettes and play with the versatility of watercolor to paint the human body, do not miss his online course "Human figure in watercolor", by Ale Casanova:

You may also be interested in:

- Artistic portrait in watercolor, a course by Ale Casanova.
- 4 basic watercolor painting exercises for beginners.
- Tutorial watercolor: how to paint with the sponge technique
- History of anatomical drawing: how illustrations revolutionized science.