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"Skin color" (excerpt)
Skin color, more than an other aspect of color or technique in this section of the book, should give the student-artist a glimpse into his or her own thought processes. A glimpse, a tear in the curtain, a rent in the canvas of the understanding of the one essential concept of this book: the difference between copying and solving problems. Skin color is an enormous problem amongst painters and students, not because it is difficult in and of itself, but because of a lack of understanding of the problems of painting and the one characteristic that skin has that the student-artist does not confront anywhere else.
We can call that characteristic elusiveness! More than any other surface the artist is called upon to describe, skin has a singular lack of local color. Simply, skin has no local color to come to grips with.
Grass is green, sky is blue, oranges are orange, the robe is red, is magenta, and so on and so on. What color is skin? The longer one stares (as in copying) the more elusive the color seems to be.
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