One thing you can do right now to improve your oil painting technique is to focus on creating smooth transitions between colours. It's okay to blend two colours together on the canvas to create a transition, but this can sometimes create a muddy tone, which is conspicuous when painting skin tones.
A better way would be to mix the transition colour - this will keep your colours fresh and correct. So instead of blending two colours, you're instead creating bleed between the transition colours.
What do I do?
For skins tones, there's no short-cut, I mix the transition colours to keep all the variations intact, it's a much better result and avoids any muddy tones. I also use a combination of techniques, i.e.
- Use the Zorn palette (see image), to create a limited but beautiful range of colour;
- create a verdaccio or grisaille underpainting and glaze colour over the top;
- do a combination of Zorn and glazing.
I prefer to finish my paintings with glazing as this creates a wonderful luminosity.
