Hello and Happy New Year to you all.
I am going to keep the writing here somewhat brief. I will let the images do most of the speaking for me.
I moved further up in Longitude with regards to the skin tones this month. Here are the reference photos I used.
For the first painting of this series done several weeks ago I focused too much on completing the image and while I feel like I learned something interesting from it, it was too focused on quality of finish and not focusing on the target color system used from the palette. This time I did two very quick sketches, about 35 minutes each while the color mixing of each took about an hour per painting and I think it was much more successful in this exercise.
From last months painting, the majority of the hues used were at the very bottom of the color wheel, many were from the purple family, some greens and some blues for reflected lights, and a few deep reds. This time the majority of hues I mixed came from the Green and Blue Green families. The girl indirectly lit had many more blue greens mixed into the reds to cool them down while the girl lit by the sun had many more warm greens mixed into the reds and oranges to subdue them chromatically or drop their chromatic intensity while still keeping them colorful. Here are the colors that were mixed.
Both color strings show a series of warm flesh tones but both are cooled off using the range of cools at the bottom of the color wheel image. With just the right percentage mixed into the oranges, orange reds, reds, and red purples, the greens and blue greens do not do anything more than drop the intensity of the hue, but leaves it completely recognizable with its intended hue.
Great series, Ron. You might consider using a color calibration target when you shoot your palettes and paintings, especially for this series. Pantone has one for $50. Then in Photoshop you just select that and choose one of the auto color balance commands then remove the mask so it corrects the whole image. My MAC is down so I can't look up the exact command but it's easy. And the targets come with RGB etc numbers so you can dial in exact corrections with more effort.
I just saw an instructable where you can make your own target from Pantone color chips glued to a black card, free if you have a color chip book to work with.
I may try that free method as a thin strip. The official targets are rectangular and use up too much image space when I shoot them beside artwork. Uncoated chips may be better as they won't reflect as much peripheral color. Worth an experiment!