Anonymous asked: Hi! I'm not totally sure if you've answered this question before, but Im having trouble with skin pallets, I find myself falling into the same boring light or dark pattern with everything I do. You don't have to answer, I know you have requests open right now so you must be busy but I seriously adore the colors of your drowning maiden redraw :), any advice?

Answer:

artofpan:

Hey! I totally understand the dilemma, I think about this a lot while I’m drawing. I think that the way to occasionally avoid having ‘default’ colours for skin palettes is to escape the inhibitions of colours in general. What I mean by that is stop thinking like “trees are green” and “skin is in the range of beige/brown”. While that is sometimes true, it restricts what we create and makes it boring to look at.

That said, here’s a few colours I put together to start with I guess?

But then if you look at stuff in context:

Some of the colours aren’t ones that you immediately go “skin”, but you are convinced when you look at them because of the relationship to the other colours around them. In the case of the drowning maiden one, I chose the colours because I wanted them to be a contrast to the cold turquoise colours in the background. Other times I’m thinking about the time of day/lighting. I hope I’m making sense??

Usually the more successful skin palettes in my work are when I’ve considered the colour palette of the whole piece in advance, rather than just colour on the fly, because that’s when I start to revert to the “trees are green” logic.