How do I paint skin texture in the style of Freud?
“I don’t want any colour to be noticeable… I don’t want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent… Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.” -Lucian Freud Achieving Freud’s delicate color mixtures for figurative art would require careful observation of the subject and lots of practice. There doesn’t appear to be any indirect (layered) technique, other than painstaking overpainting to adjust contours and mixtures. The paint texture is, I believe the result of using a lead-based white with a “long” body, ropey and viscous. My best guess as to an easily obtainable, comparable white would be Old Holland Cremnitz White. From http://painting.about.com/od/famouspaint… “According to critic Robert Hughes, Freud’s “basic pigment for flesh is Cremnitz white, an inordinately heavy pigment which contains twice as much lead oxide as flake white
