Peter's Sketchbook

[Peter]

Great work you've done, I also prefer the 4th thumbnail. My only advice would be to make hair and skin a bit less saturated right now they are both too bright and seem to be unnatural. Generally, human skin doesn't have a lot of saturated colors, but receives huge amount of reflection from the surroundings. So, it's better to paint grey-ish but with variety of colors.
Since you'd be painting  it in real media (btw, oils or gouache?) I'd suggest you to create a fleshtone color wheel. It's like a regular color wheel with primaries+secondaries but with premixed complementary pairs. For example, at the place of yellow you'd have dark mustard: cad yell + a bit of violet, at the place of regular violet color you'd have dull violet: violet + some of cad yell. Surprisingly, this method creates a variety of harmonized colors.
Hope, I described it more or less understandable, if not feel free to ask.

Thanks Roanna that's the one i ended up going with. Thanks for the imput her skin did feel abit off to me but I wasn't really sure how to fix it, it's been ages since I've painted skin so I'm rather rusty.

Going to be painting with oils, starting with a burnt umber pick out and then aplying colour on top. I think Iget what you mean regarding the "skin colour wheel", is it like the colour wheels James Gurney does in his book  (Imaginative Realism I think) when he is trying to harmonize his colours? I'll definitely give it a go using my limited pallette once I've done the pick out stage.