I have repainted the same forearm four times today and it is starting to win
Working on a half-length figure, a woman seated by a window, left forearm resting on the table. Everything else is behaving. The forearm is not.
Four times now. Each time I scrape it back, the drawing is fine, the value is fine, and then I go in with the half tones and it goes waxy. Like the skin of a mannequin. I know exactly what I'm doing wrong by the third pass and I do it anyway, because the correct version looks wrong to me at that moment, and so I chase the wrong thing until it dries enough to punish me.
What is left on the palette is a grey I mixed at eleven this morning for the shadow side and it is perfect. I keep looking at it. Small mound of it, cool, a little violet in it, mixed with lead white and raw umber and something I've already forgotten. That grey is the only thing in the studio that has any idea what it's doing today.
Anyway the light has gone. Not looking for advice, I know what the problem is. Just saying it out loud so I stop pretending it's the model's arm and not mine.
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The waxy thing is a light problem, not a skin problem. Half tones go dead when you paint them as a separate color instead of as a darker version of the light you already have. You sit there in the correct version going "that's not flesh," so you pump in something richer, and now it's plastic. Mannequin is the punishment for fixing a value that was right.
I'd leave the forearm alone until it fully dries, then do one pass only. One. If it goes wrong, scrape it and walk away for the day. Four passes on one square of canvas is not the forearm winning, it is you negotiating with yourself in a language the paint doesn't speak.
Also that grey from eleven in the morning is probably fine. It is the best thing on the palette and you keep refusing to trust it.
"A darker version of the light you already have" is the sentence I needed and did not want. I have been mixing the half tone as a thing in itself, a colour to place, and of course it reads as a separate material lying on the flesh. Voilà. And the part about pumping in something richer because the correct version looks like nothing yet, yes, that is exactly the negotiation, and I lose it every time.
The "one pass only, then walk away" is harder. I would rather scrape four times and feel I am working. But you are right that four passes is just me arguing with my own judgment, and the canvas pays for it.
It is drying now. I will give it two days and go in once, thin, and keep the light in it.