The PANTONE® color of skin

[Henrix]

I just thought this was a funny and interesting resource for painting skin and faces.

Humanae is an ongoing project by Angelica Dass, a Brazialian artist, which she describes thus:

Humanae  is a chromatic inventory, a project that reflects on the colors beyond the borders of our codes by referencing the PANTONE® color scheme.
(PANTONE® Guides are one of the main classification systems of colors, which are represented by an alphanumeric code, allowing to accurately recreate any of them in any media. It is a technical industrial standard often called Real Color)
The project development is based on a series of portraits whose background is dyed with the exact Pantone® tone extracted from a sample of 11x11 pixels of the portrayed’s face. The project’s objective is to record and catalog all possible human skin tones.

(Now for the real question, is there a Pantone to Vallejo conversion chart anywhere...  )

[FramFramson]

I wonder about how useful this might be, since in practice you'll have hundreds, even thousands, of distinct visible colours in a given person's face and skin.

Even if you pare it down to a few dozen colours, they still change constantly with lighting, atmospheric conditions, and the person's actual physical condition.

[Hammers]

I wonder about how useful this might be, since in practice you'll have hundreds, even thousands, of distinct visible colours in a given person's face and skin.

Even if you pare it down to a few dozen colours, they still change constantly with lighting, atmospheric conditions, and the person's actual physical condition.

I was thinking the same.

[Henrix]

Whoa, guys, you are talking like you generally see miniatures painted in a myriad different tones depending on light and whatnot.

I'd love to see that, because 90% of all miniatures I see are painted using the exact same palette as the painter always uses. Same basic skin tone, same shadows, same highlights.
And I'm guilty of it too. I try to vary the figures, but far too often I stick to the same old paints.

[FramFramson]

I get a fair variation, but that's because I usually mix colours and unless you're using an eyedropper (I'm not) you don't get idential ratios every time. That's more a happy side benefit of my laziness though.

Not every experiment is successful though. Sometimes I have to bust out the acetone...  

[Red Orc]

In general terms, it's gotta be more useful than having the same half-dozen shades though, hasn't it?

I'm sure we all mix our paints and do different shading and whatnot (I'm very fond of purple washes in certain places because let's face it, who can be bothered to paint veins?) but I can't see how more 'flesh' colours could be a problem. Sometimes mixing paints just doesn't work; a blended colour that looks fine when it's wet sometimes dries to something totally different, I've found. Of course, nowhere does it say all these colours are going to be made in acrylics, so it's all a moot point... but even a few extra paint colours for skin would be a bonus I think.

The very fact that there are about 70 pics all with different coloured 'average' skin (which doesn't go any way to replicating the shades on a single person's face, let alone the rest of their body - for example the guy in the second row on the left whose face is quite orangey, but whose shoulders are much paler, alternating pink and yellow) means that the variety of human skin tones is immense, probably infinite; more different colours can only be good, surely?

[Henrix]

What one can do, quite simply, is to do like the guy who did the Ethnic Skintones article on CMoN.

Take a picture. Use the colour picker in your photo manipulation program of choice wherever you want to analyse the colour, and then use the paintbucket to fill a square.
A very effective way of really seeing what's there. It's quite surprising at times.
(Of course, you may need to take several samples in the area you're interested in to see all the nuances.)

[FramFramson]

Yeah... I find that CMoN article to be a much more directly useful (to wargamers) implementation of this idea.

The Pantone project is probably going to be more useful to computer modellers.