Practical Color Theory For Portrait and Figurative Artists

Simplifying the complexities of depicting human skin tones

This lecture series is intended to provide anyone interested in the human subject in art with a guide for assessing and understanding skin color. An added bonus is that the same concepts and ideas put forth in this course will help anyone in their understanding of nearly any color, not just skin tones. Although Color Theory is a vast and complicated subject, and this course narrows in on skin color, that is itself very broad and far-ranging, so there is plenty to go through. The course focuses primarily on presenting the most useful aspects of color theory for representational artists and provides a logical and simplified vocabulary for that, namely: hue, value, and chroma. More specifically, you will learn how to use this "language" when considering or describing the nuanced world of skin tones without relying, for example, on names of paints (as opposed to names of colors). Paint names can be surprisingly misleading since the same paint from one manufacturer can look quite different from the paint with same name from another. The concepts presented will be useful for artists in any medium.

Through lecture and demonstration, including some exercises that subscribers may wish to try on their own, this course will develop a theoretical framework for the artist. But, as the title implies, it will be more than theoretical because the knowledge gained can and, perhaps, ought to be put into practice and used every day.