Taking the umbrage out of umber

Today's tutorial Tuesday posts are all about the greenish colors! Many thanks to Maddie Miller for getting the conversation started with this excellent guest post about finding uses for her Raw Umber and Raw Umber Shade Pan Pastels.

One Hundred and One Three Uses for Raw Umber Pan Pastel

by Maddie Miller

If you are like me, you probably ordered the Weathering Effects PanPastel set. I bought mine from Amazon.

 I was really pleased with the colors.... well, most of them. I liked them all except for the pond-scummy, Shrek colored, crusty shoe grime hue they call "raw umber". Ugh, why is it so green?? 

For a long time, the raw umber and its equally dreadful partner "raw umber shade" sat unused in my pastel bin. Why on earth would I put *that* on a model?

But I'm a firm believer in trying to use the things that I've invested in, so it's been my personal mission to make this gloomy color find a purpose. And so far, I've come up with THREE. WHOLE. REASONS. To keep good ol' "pond water" around. 

1) BASES: dirt comes in a plethora of colors. If you look carefully, you can see green tint to certain types of soil (at least where I live), especially if it's damp. I like to incorporate it to add some variety and highlights to my bases, and because it looks like it would be moist to the touch, it looks good in any hoof print grooves. 

2) GRULLA: grullas sort of have a green tint along with the grays and tawny hues. I use the raw umber pastels *in moderation*. It's more of a finishing effect than something I begin the custom with, but a final layer of this stuff can equalize a grulla that's too tan/yellow or too flat of a gray. 

On this medallion, the areas around the back, shoulders, cheeks, and upper neck are raw umber. I used raw umber shade for the muscles. The pale areas are alternating coats of gray and diarylide yellow tint pan pastel. I did use black for the legs and her face mask, but I toned the color down with raw umber.

3) DARK SKIN: if you look at a real horse, their skin isn't always stark, perfect black. Sometimes it's faded or just off-black for whatever reason. To me the muzzle and eye skin color are dark but not exactly black, and not exactly gray either. Of course it varies from horse to horse though, and you should definitely have a reference photo!

I use raw umber to tone down the dark inky starkness of plain black. I typically start with an initial layer of black pan pastel for the muzzle/eyes/groin areas, but then I will alternate between black and the raw umber to get a color that's not quite brown, it's not stark black, but it's not flat gray either. 

Raw umber shade on my NaMo pony's muzzle and eye. It's the first layer, so the color isn't very strong, but I like the softer color on this model.

Thank you again, Maddie. We're going to discuss some more uses for Raw Umber in today's second and third posts!