The "ugly stage".
...Made moreso, because there's so much teaching required in regard to color mixing, that I didn't quite get to where I wanted at this stage. So, we're talking like 15 minutes on this one. It's close, though.
I haven't fully realized the Paxson palette yet (at least, not well enought to teach it), so I teach the way I'm most familiar with, using (oh dear) cadmium colors.
Here's the palette:
Cadmium Yellow
Cadmium Orange
Cadmium Red
Yellow Ochre
Burnt Umber
Raw Umber
Ultramarine Blue
Alizarin Crimson (for mixing the sweater color)
Ivory Black
Titanium White
Medium: Holbein cold pressed linseed oil
It's simple, I know - but I think it's fairly effective.
...And Bouguereau was known to have used Cadmium Yellow and Orange, according to Daniel Burliegh Parkhurst. Am I rationalizing? Perhaps
The first thing I show the students is the use of neutrals. I demonstrate the mixing of 3 types of neutrals in a 5th value: cool, warm, and a "true" neutral. Cool = black + white. Warm = raw umber + white. Neutral = black + white + raw umber.
"True" neutrals play a vital role in the shadow planes in flesh tones, for when they are juxtaposed with the light plane of the head, full of warm colors, the eye shifts them into a cooler mode automatically. Too cool in the shadow, and the head takes on an alien look. Too warm, and the shadow plane comes too far forward. It's true that there are places where you'll find definitive spots of warm and cool in the shadows, but they
are just "spots", and not the basis of the entire shadow plane.
Next, we mix up our much more chromatic light plane colors. I asked the students to observe the model's "personal palette", and discern what's happening in her face color-wise. Most of the chroma occurs in the middle third of the face, and the jawline and forehead planes are more neutrally pigmented. Kirstin had a tendency (under this light) to go ochre-to-neutral in the jawline and around the mouth, and a rose-red color in the cheek and nostrils.
Using the cadmiums and yellow ochre, we mixed out 3 values (middle, light, very light) altering the hue from red to yellow as the value increased. I had them pay careful attention to the fact that mixing white to bump up the value deadens the chroma, and you end up with a cadaverous flesh tone (not pleasing!). So I told them to always mix back a touch of yellow or orange to re-invigorate the warmth in that value.
Once we had this basic palette down, we laid in our shadow values first (neutrals), while I stressed the necessity of working from dark to light. The came our middle value in the light plane. I showed how to tweak the chroma through mixing like-value neutrals into the chromatic middle value. I also talked about hue-shifting as well in this region, such as adding yellow ochre wet-on-wet to get the desired effect. From there, we built our lights, careful not to overmix on the canvas, noting that this causes unwanted neutrality as well as pushing everything in the light plane into a middle-value state.
While this is all happening, we are constantly "tweaking" the drawing - paying careful attention to plane placement and the big relationships.
I am using some Isabey #10 flats and filberts for this stage. The panel is from SourceTek: Claussens triple-primed portrait linen mounted on birch, 10 x 12.
*Note - This photo was taken under warm light conditions. Notice the color of the raw umber background. Unfortunately, everything is a little warmer than it should be here.