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The problem with rendering the skin is that you perceive the skin as having one color but if you do it with one color (darkening with burnt umber, making it lighter with white) then it will look like plastic.
Skin has both transparant, textural and reflecting qualities which are important to show. Blood (red), fat (yellow) and bones (blue white) are underneath it. Giving life to skin is giving it effects showing these qualities. As a matter of fact: these effects are more important than the color, as long as you incorporate them you can even make a convincing blue skinned human.
The effects show up the best in white people for their skin is the most transparant.
It's the easiest to do in multiple layers. In the first layer you'll need to block in the unifying flesh tone that will make it seem as if the color of the skin is the same all over (the initial feeling you have about the skin). I typically use a mixture of yellow ochre or naples yellow, a dash of a warming color like cadmium red, orange or burnt sienna and tone the whole thing down with lead white (the most organic of the 3 whites). This is quite an opaque mixture and it needs to be.
It's absolutely essential to get this color right, it's the 'flesh color' artists talk about and it's also dependant on the hair color of the person (scottish redheads have a very pale purplish variety, reddish brunettes have a heavy ochre (copper) feel to it, blondes pinkish, etc.)
The skin is not of equal thickness and there're different things underneath it. Some skin is more greasy and will reflect more light.
The cheeks for example are very fleshy, the skin here is very greasy and smooth textured. If someone smiles and is excited the flesh will thicken (stretching the skin) and more blood will show, especially around the cheek bones where the flesh will also curl up the roundest.
You typically indicate the blood by using red here, the most around the cheek bones towards the nose where the skin is stretched the most. You can use cadmium red (you can do everything with cadmium yellow, orange and red but this will look too reddish) but more interesting and realistic effects considering blood can be attained by using quinacridone red, but not too purplish: save that for knuckles and knee caps where the skin is not greasy but very lean and the 'orange' feel to red will diminish.
Underneath the eyes the smiling cheek muscles will be very round and the skin very stretched. Here the quinacridone will be the most warm and saturated. Indicate the stretch of the skin by saturating the color which is underneath it (blood and fat). Since it's round, smooth and greasy there will always be a highlight on it. Highlights are not the color of the surface on which they are but the color of the light itself (mostly white sunlight). Because the skin here is so greasy and thus very much reflecting, the highlight will be sharp edged (the 'metal' look).
The eye lids are another story, they're very greasy (as if they're sweating) but don't show blood. They're often very grey colored compared to the other flesh colors and umber can get you somewhere but they're also 'cold'. It's good to use a cold neutral color like cobalt blue in their mixture. Eye shadow on the eye lids often has metallic cold colors like cobalt blue, blue purple, even green. Like all 'natural' looking make up, it emphasizes its color. The smooth roundness and greasiness of the eye lids recquire highlight like the smiling cheeks.
The lump of flesh of the eye brow hanging over the upper eye lid is very greasy but has the warmness of the relaxed cheek (although blood doesn't fill it up when excited). The forehead is also greasy but not warm because there're less muscles here. Yellow should dominate here (ofcourse not straight from the tube, the result should look like an orange yellow, emphasizing yellow as a colder color)
Knee caps, elbows, knuckles of the fingers are covered by thin and lean skin. If you make a fist you will see that the color is very light, the transparant skin shows bone (and in the case of the knuckles much tendons) which are cold colored organic white (they're not really blue but they appear like it because of the contrast with the warm colors of the skin). There are also little pools of blood (as specks) which are colored quite purple because of the blueish white of the bones underneath.
The old face has a less reflective skin because the skin get more roughly textured and there's less fat underneath it. Young ones have a more yellow face.
Colors like green and blue are not really part of the skin color but still you can see them in shadows. In shadow areas the light is the result of reflection (you should never use black as shadow for even in shadow there's light). In televized reports of snooker for example you can see this very nicely. The player bending over the green clothed table, the shadow areas of his face which don't catch the direct light from above are saturated green. The fact that it is saturated is because the lights are artificial and are single directed, not bouncing off the surrounding audience for example but only from the green table.
All shadow colors need to be transparant colors else it will look like the shadows are actually cut out. Only highlights and the skin color itself (with its reds, browns, purples, yellows) are opaque.
Even though this post is getting long, it's by no means complete but I hope it will aid you in learning to look at human figures. Look at a lot of photos and see which parts are more red (blood in muscles), which parts are more yellow (fat), which are duller (sloppy or rough textured skin) and which are more saturated (stretched or smooth skin). Compare parts of the body with other parts, how do the eyelids look like compared with the cheeks for example. It's the proper distribution of reds that makes a face 'alive' with expression. Take a good look of photos with different facial expressions and see how the blood is distributed in the face as a result of that expression (a blush ofcourse the most obvious example)
As for books: about any book about human figure painting discusses how to render flesh but I don't know of any books that have this as central topic.
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