 Hi there, it's Sandy Allnock, artist and crafter here on YouTube, and I'm going to be painting skin tones today on People. I wanted to talk a little bit about skin tones, so I'm going to use the MFT Old Friends stamp set and stamp all four of the old people. And I stamped the most forward one, the short little lady first, and then kept stamping others behind and masking each one out so that you could get this kind of picture of them standing in a group. And the color that I put down first was yellow ochre. If you're looking for just generic Caucasian skin tones, yellow ochres are a good start. But I'm also mixing some new gambos with cobalt blue and a little anthracanoid scarlet to make a brow. When you're mixing brows, there's no perfect mix. I can't say take a dollop of this, a dollop of that, and a dollop of that. I can take any red, blue and yellow and come up with a neutral. That's just what red, yellow and blue do when they're all together. And how much of each one you use and how thick the mixture is, meaning how much paint versus how much water, that's going to determine what brown you get or what gray you get. And you'll get used to it over time as you practice, but it takes practice. I'm pretty good at being able to just grab a dollop of a particular color and know that it's going to make about what I'm looking for. Except on this guy, I knew right away if I wanted him to be an African-American old man, that was not going to be enough color for my first cast. So I wanted to put more in. So I mixed a little more color, a little more pigment in it, so that I could drop it into the wet paint and make him a little darker skinned. I'm not coloring the glasses in this first pass. I'll do the same on the little lady who also has glasses on. And we'll talk about that in the second pass. And when I say pass, I mean when you're painting something and you go through painting the first layer of everything and then you paint the second layer, I call that passes as well as layers. Sometimes I use one term or another. And for now, on this first pass, I'm making flat color. I'm not looking at adding any dimension necessarily. I'm just making the colors flat across everything. And I'll add the dimension in the next time I go through. I should have painted that lady's legs right now. I didn't. So I'm going to have to go and make a matching-ish color later on. So you'll see me do that when you get to that part of the video. So here's that yellow ochre color. And for this little lady, I'm just going to use the yellow ochre straight up by itself. And you'll be able to see what that color looks like. For a lot of stampers who are just painting on cards, this is perfectly fine to use as a Caucasian color. Again, leaving her glasses open for now. If you're just going to do one pass and it's going to be a light pass, you could leave the glasses completely white. But I'm going to add color in them because generally, you just see a lighter color in the glasses than you do on the skin. I've added a little bit more color to the yellow ochre to make this old man a slightly darker color. So you can see, depending on what color you add and how much, you can change skin tones by just the slightest variation by adding in a drop of something else. Sometimes a color that just happens to be on your palette, sometimes grabbing something from the pans themselves. And I'm going to zoom through doing the hair on these. I did make sure that the face was really dry so that the hair doesn't blend into the skin. I have on many, many occasions ended up dropping the hair color in and it just blended right into the skin and made huge messes. So watching how wet or dry everything is next to everything else is important. And to that effect, I'm going to, instead of going back in and doing my passes, my next passes on the skin tone, I'm going to zoom through and color a few areas that don't touch any of the skin that's wet. I want to get this first pass done so that I can add more color to it later and have some of these areas that'll be drying while the other parts dry. So a lot of times I'll move from one section of a painting to another in order to wait for something to dry on its own. The less you use a heat gun or something or a hairdryer to dry your paint, the less warping of your paper you're going to end up getting overall when you're talking about something this small. So now we're going to slow it down again a little bit. I'm going to mix up another color to start adding in the second pass for the shadows on each one of my people. And it's a matter of looking at the color that's in your palette and getting an idea of what color you want to put the shadows. I find adding a shadow on the left or right is a lot easier than trying to add central lighting, meaning putting color for the shadows around all sides of a face. Because then you're dealing with trying to make everything meet in the middle in some fashion, which is really hard. So here I've put down the areas that I want definite shadows, rinsed my brush and dried it off on a paper towel, and then just smooth the edges over with that thirsty brush, which will pick up the color on the edges and soften that without doing a whole lot more. I also went into the glasses at this point and did just a little quick swipe, allowing some highlights to be there as well. So that's going to make the glasses look a little bit more dimensional. Same with this lady, put down the colors that I want to have as the real shadows and then blending out the edge of whatever other colors on the other side so that I end up with a lighter side and a darker side. Now I'm going to go back to the same colors that I had used before, the yellow ochre, and I'm going to add more yellow ochre onto her, but I'm going to add her glasses color now. The rest of her skin is going to have two layers of the paint, whereas the glasses are going to have one layer. And that's what will make it look like there's a difference between the glasses and the skin tone and getting a little lighter color inside the glasses area. Now with this older guy, his skin tone, when I had mixed another color into it, came out a little bit on the pallid side. So instead of adding another color to the yellow ochre this time, I'm going to use a stronger, just plain old yellow ochre color that's going to brighten his skin up a little bit so he's not as dingy. And again, adding the color on the left with just softening the color out with the brush on the right-hand side. And that's really the extent of shading for their faces. When you have a big mass of hair like this, this is one of those places where on a painting like this, you can give the viewer a cue, even if the rest of the lighting is not super strong because you're not going to put really in most cases, you're not going to put really strong contrast in lighting on skin tones. You can do that with the hair, with the lady with the big poof of hair. She's got really dark hair in the shadows now with some highlights. So she's got both. That gives the viewer a cue right away when you see one area, even if you don't pick up on it, the viewer will see that and go, oh, there's lighting there. They don't know what they're seeing all the time, but you can see the dimension because of it. So I'm going through on each one of their clothing areas and I'm doing the same thing in the second pass. I'm adding extra color on the left-hand side, extra shadow, sometimes really dark like on his pants, sometimes a little lighter. So here I wanted her to have a white apron on and it came out too light after I had lifted some of that color. So I added more in the shadows. I'm going to do his shirt the same kind of a way, putting the overall gray down in the shadow side and then I'll go back and add more color. With this lady, she's going to wear a yellow jacket and a yellow dress, but I'm going to paint them separately. Here I am, trying to mix a color for her legs to match her face and I should have done that earlier on and didn't. And then I'll go over here and paint this guy's pants. Again, I'm trying to pay attention to what's wet and what's not so that as I move across the picture, I'm balancing out where I'm painting and not having to dry all the time. As I'm going around the painting though, I'm looking for different areas where I can give the viewer a cue about the fact that there is shadows in one area or another. I thought this lady's dress could use some orange-ish colors on the left in order to add those shadows, et cetera. And the final cue for me is always in the shadows on the ground. They're going to be shadows straight out to the left, very long ones coming out from the feet of each one of the people. It gives them distance in between them so they are socially distancing old people out on their shenanigans. And the background that I decided I wanted to create, I wanted to give them some sort of a setting and you can imagine a background like this either being the old folks home that they live in and that they're standing out on the patio or something together or whether they've gone out shopping or to the movies or something, these could be shopping windows behind them at a, you know, out on the street, something like that. So I'm going to give them two posts behind them and then large flat areas of color. The secret for getting large flat areas to work is to keep the leading edge wet. So I'm working all the way up and down that leading edge. You can go from the top to the bottom or left to right and kind of depends on how you tend to work but I've added a second layer so that I could put a little bit of detail around the window edges, et cetera. And then another layer after it dried of really dark right in behind the center one so that these folks stand out in the center and we get really nice highlights and shadows on the hair that I had worked so hard on earlier. And I love you're never too old for shenanigans as the sentiment on the inside because you never are too old for shenanigans. I plan to be involved in shenanigans until I am very, very old. Not in about you, but I am determined. So I hope this was helpful to you in some way. I will see you again in another video very soon. Click the like button. Supplies are all in the doo-doo-doo. I'll chat later. Bye-bye.