Portrait Painting Tutorial - How to Paint Dark Skin

In this portrait painting tutorial, realist painter Alex Tzavaras shows you how to paint a portrait of someone with dark skin. Alex demonstrates how to make dark skin colours using a limited palette of just three colours, Titanium White, Transparent Oxide Red and Ultramarine Blue.

The main difference when painting a portrait of someone with dark skin compared to someone with lighter skin is that there will be much wider range of tonal values. This means the shadows, lights and highlights will appear further apart from each other and the lights will appear much darker. For this reason, a really common mistake is to think dark skin tones are shadows, when in fact they are in areas of light. To solve this problem in portrait painting, as well as thinking in terms of light and dark tonal values, it's really important that we study study our subject's form and observe which parts of are facing towards or away from the light source.

You can see a full length version of this oil painting tutorial, fimed in real time
on Alex's Patreon Channel.
https://www.patreon.com/simplifydrawingandpainting

Alex Tzavaras is a contemporary realist artist offering portrait painting and alla prima oil painting tutorials. Alex teaches the traditional painting techniques artists used to draw and paint from life up until the start of the 20th century.

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http://alextzavaras.com