Friday, March 27, 2009

hair - info not covered in workshop

For those of you that were at my workshops... I didn't discuss the topic of rendering hair. Actually I very conveniently chose a reference photo that didn't have any hair showing! :-O

OK colors for the hair underpainting... are not the same as the flesh colors (unless they have rosy colored hair - oh my). What I do is choose colors I see in the reference and try and use one or  two or three  colors from the flesh toned underpainting palette. So maybe with a sandyblond hair - I might use burnt umber, a sandy brown color, cinnamon, and a yellow ochre. The more colors I can use from that flesh palette the better - for color harmony. 

Here's some samples below. I tried to figure out what colors I used... because I didn't have them written down.


This is an example of dark hair.. that when lit by a warm light has a lot of red tones. So I was able to use burnt umber and Pompeiian Red in the colors. To which I added a greenish brown and some soft blue highlights.

This is ummmm my hair which is that ash color. I managed to get burnt umber in there... and then made sure I used some cinnamon in some highlighted areas in the later stages.
This hair is a strawberry color so it was easy to get my underpainting colors in! I left out the Pompeiian Red in Place of an orangey-er color.
This last one has some burnt umber, cinnamon and ivory in it... but again the Pompeiian Red was replaced with a golden brown color. I think I galzed some greenish color in areas as well.




1 comment:

Unknown said...

thank you thank you thank you Nicole. It takes extra time and effort for you to share these wonderful techniques of yours but novices like myself treasure them! thank you!