Base coat for black skin tone?

[godfather]

I am going to try my hand at painitng Black skintone with oils. I am not sure what acrylic base coat to use. Also can someone point me in the direction of some simple oil paint recipes for black skin tones?

 

[montythefirst]

I don't with oils but this is quite a useful guide http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1310

hope it helps

Simon

 

[Einion]

I am going to try my hand at painitng Black skintone with oils. I am not sure what acrylic base coat to use.

Why don't you try some experiments, see what you think works best? Although you could work over black or white for either extreme if you had to I think what colour the basecoat should be depends how dark you want to go on the finished paintjob, your mileage may vary.

Einion

 

[DEL]

Go with Einions suggestion and try some experiments.
I've seen very effective results where orange and of all things green undercoats being used.
Good luck and keep us posted.
Cheers
Derek

 

[Einion]

I've seen very effective results where orange and of all things green undercoats being used.

Yeah, there's a famous pinup artist who used a sort of emerald green as a base with overpainting in a vermillion-coloured paint to make all his fleshtones, sometimes it's amazing what works!

Sidestepping the usual flat undercoat with all the modelling done in the oil paint you could even do a grisaille and then glaze for all the colouration, long tradition of that in oils and it can work really well with practice. Particularly useful for tough colours like light blues and yellow.

Einion

 

[Meehan34]

I would basecoat in a tan.

 

[MarquisMini]

i use acrylics and as a base for african skintone i use German camo black/brown and burnt umber.

 

[godfather]

thanks all! Simon thanks for the link I actually had that somewhere in my files and totally forgot about it!

 

[brian]

Get yourself a can of Humbrol Desert Tan as i found this is a good starting base coat for dark flesh tones.
Brian

 

[polyphemus]

Maybe some UK members will remember Joe Shaw who gave painting demos at various shows. His recipe was a coat of water based dark green as undercoat, burnt umber oil as the mid tone brushed out thinly, prussian blue mixed in wet on wet as the shade and gold ochre oils worked in as the highlight. The trick in this is to keep the prussian blue and the gold ochre away from each other; green flesh isn't attractive.

Geoff

 

[montythefirst]

no probs

 

[frank h]

Hi
I recently finished a Somali Dubat .... using artists acrylics for the skin tone
I mixed cadmium red with a dark green .... resulting in a warm brown ... then added prussian blue just a bit to darken
I lightened it with white for highlights ..... then washed it over with a sort of burgundy red ... mixed from .... cadmium red and prussian blue..... Hope this may be of some help
Frank