Color Theory Tutorial
for portrait artists - lessons on using color for portrait art.
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Some examples of my portrait art work...
 Digital artwork |
 Colored pencil portrait |
 Alkyd painting |
Color—that mysterious thing! But color is wonderful, powerful, emotional. It's not that hard to have some power over color in your artwork, once you understand a few basics. But you will have to do some research - I can't do this all for you!
First off, if you don't know the basics of color theory, I'm going to redirect you to some other sites to get caught up. It is beyond the scope of this site to teach you color theory from scratch. I want to focus on color for portraits. If you don't know what "primary colors" and "secondary colors" are, if you've never seen a "color wheel", then visit these excellent web sites:
Insanely Great Color Tutorial - Oh sure, your eyes might glaze over a bit looking at all the diagrams, but trust me, you need this. Don't be a wimp. Learn it. You can still have fun with drawing and portraits at the same time. But until you understand how color works, and how to mix colors, you are doomed as far as really being in control of your color work. So, LEARN IT.
Color Matters - An excellent site, all geared towards educating you about COLOR!
Check out this delightful site on color theory: Among other things, it illustrates and explains the concept of "color schemes". You'll learn what the terms "complimentary", "analogous", "warm" and "cool" mean in relation to color theory.
Now that you've gotten caught up with some of the basics of color, let me pontificate a bit about my views on color theory, and portraits.
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