Redhead & skin tones - Spectrum Noirs

Well hello, on this fine and snow-free afternoon. Can't quite believe it snowed all afternoon yesterday but now the warmer temperature and rain has literally washed it all away.

Anyway I've been playing with my Speccies - something I've wanted to do for ages is to produce a 'key' if you like for skin tones and hair colours so that I have a reference. I spend ages playing around trying to work it out each time so I thought I'd finally sit down and come up with something permanent.

So today I'm sharing my version of skin tones with red hair.

To create the red hair I used

 Here's a group shot of each skin tone with red hair

I came up with 5 skin tones, from very pale to golden and variations in between. So here is a closer look at each with red hair.                   
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As you can see there are certain skin tones that work with the red hair and some that clearly don't! I've wrote the numbers of the Speccies on each for the skin tone blends I used.

My personal preference is to start with the light tone first all over the face, then I go round the fringe and cheeks with the next then I only dot the darkest round the fringe and on the cheeks.  Then I use small circular motion and blend them together with either the lightest or the second lightest depending on the look I want to achieve. Sometimes you can't use the first colour on top as it bleaches the colour too much when working with darker colours. But it's fine when using only 2 colours.

I do the same with the hair - start with the lightest all over and then add the darker layers always leaving more of a space to let the lighter colours come through.

I hope this is of interest to you - I like doing silly things like this, but do find it helpful for future reference!

In posting this I realised I should have taken pictures at each step of the red hair & skin but to be fair we would be here all day and it's the overall affect I wanted to share most.

Right I'm off to play with more hair colours - I've got blond, medium brown, golden brown and dark brown to try with each skin tone!

Take care Zo xx