Again working on the skin tones. So, I’ve finally created about 15 skin tones that match actual people! I eventually got a some red dye, and mixing it with various amounts of brown shades, green, yellow, and blue, I got shades that looked so close, but for some reason weren’t quite what I wanted. One morning, I looked at my own wrist, to which matching foundation shades has always been difficult, and realized that my problem was that I was trying to match this dead piece of wood to something alive and continually changing. Then, I remembered that whether or not I was finding the right shades, I was going to have to match skin tones with the finished pieces of wood, so I added some oil to the wood to see what it looked like. What a difference! What I found was that by adding some Dutch or Tung oil to the wood, I got the depth I needed to replicate skin tone enough so that someone could say, “Hey, that’s me!” After that, I started finding people of various skin tones to match and found that with the oil, I was really successful – even to the point of knowing that in some cases, I’d already found the right shade.
Here are some pictures…I just tacked them to the end of another Flickr group.
