Looking at skin tones, paint and importance

Here is my latest painting of the beautiful Cecilie, painted from a reference potograph.

As you can see, Cecilie is quite pale in her skin tones. if you want to make your paintings look more like the person you are portraying, it is important to get their skin tones right. The best way to do this is to mix colours individually for each person, if its a painting you are going to be spending some time on, rather than a short, timed, life drawing.

Here is my paintbox

And here you can see the colours I have mixed to paint Cecilie. There are 4 basic colours. The first one on the left is for highlights and paler areas of the skin, the second on is for the shadows, the third one is for warmer skin tone areas that are a wee bit darker and the fourth one is for cooler areas that are a wee bit paler. You can also mix and match these colours to do the full range of skin tones required.