On the beach

I think you have done a wonderful job of portraying the delicate skin of a young child. Lovely pose as well. I tend to use cad red/yellow ochre/touch of alizarin if needed for warmth/cobalt/cerulean when I do portraits of children. I also tend to try and leave white paper as highlights as children tend to have very flat faces - no real angles or lines, etc and leaving the white paper can add some shape (if you see what I mean).

Thank you very much for your kind comments about my new drawing Francis portrait. AS far as tips on skin tones...this is very personal to each artist. The only suggestion I can make is the way I add colour. I use a base colour which gives all the dark or mid tones. Then by overlaying lights and darks, you save having to put in all the gradations because the background shows through. Many of the classic and well known artist use a background base like sepia or burnt sienna. If you look at many of my works you will see this style of overpaint....hope this helps

Thanks Thea and Frank, so grateful for your feedback. Thea, your remark about the angles is spot on - the underlying bone structure is covered in puppy fat, so looks very flat in a painting. I'm going to try your palette today, in combination with Frank's tips about layering. If I can get it to work for me, I'll post it. Thanks again.

I just love this painting, its beautiful.

Delightful portrait of this little girl Sharon, and I agree with The and Frank's tips for skintones in watercolour, or in any medium come to that, lay down a base colour that you can build up the final tones from and the base colour of course needs to be one that you can use with bits of it showing through the final work to add a glow to the end result

Love it!

Thanks Karyl, Ros and Petra. It is a delightful little scene, that's what attracted me in the first place. A good basis to practice the skin tones on. Work in progress !

I think this is a lovely delicate figure painting with a great palette. I love how you have painted the hair.

Lovely painting

take up pastels again after seeing my Dawns early light!...well I think you should if all theses works of yours are anything to go by...love the delicate faces, great stuff