| Dear John, Figures are not my thing any more , but there was a time when figure painting was something i tried to get to grips with.
Firstly as Greg states, think SCALE colour.... mute all the colours and reduce the contrast. Look at examples in real life which to your eye are close in size to the figures you are wanting to paint and make a note of how much light and shade you can see, how strong the colour is. In short let your observations inform you. The quick answer that colours that you'll see are various kinds of grey coloured-yes, but grey-mostly. the next point is that you might notice that the colours are very seldom primary or secondary, they are usually tertiary "muddy" colours. To that end, and this has helped me get some surprisingly realistic flesh tones, I've used as a basis for flesh, yellow ochre ( dirty brownish yellow), and magenta (a purplish red).
Combined , these will give you a mix of the three pigment primaries red/yellow/blue to result in a tertiary base colour when white is added which looks more natural than most of the red/yellow/white blends which come over as too bright and too neutral usually.
hope my input has helped a bit.
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"Perry pick your discarded sprue off the floor!!!!" |