The Portrait in Color

Description

Color is a vast and challenging topic for art students. Without instruction, novice artists can easily become overwhelmed by the sheer variety of color in the world, both in nature and in our materials. This class seeks to demystify color development in portraiture. Building upon our past portrait drawing classes, The Portrait in Color will guide students through simple strategies for achieving convincing, natural flesh tones, presented via two long-pose portrait demonstrations.

As with most of our Live Streaming Classes, this class will feature two instructors. Melinda Whitmore will demonstrate a portrait painting in oil, while David Jamieson will draw a portrait in pastel. Students are free to choose which medium they’d prefer to work with, and follow along with that instructor, while still gaining insight from the other demo. This “two pronged” approach to teaching is a hallmark of Live Streaming Classes at Vitruvian Studio. Two instructors, working simultaneously, allows for cross-pollination of ideas, techniques and concepts that enriches the learning experience for everyone. In each demo, the focus will be on developing a portrait with a credible likeness, a convincing sense of light and 3-dimensionality, and natural-looking flesh tones. Discussion of color development will happen at the materials level (colorant selection and mixing strategies), supported by theoretical concepts including 3-dimensional “color space” and the Munsell system.

This class will be streamed live on Zoom every week. The primary class session will meet between 1:00pm and 4:00pm on Sunday afternoons (Central Time), when the instructors will teach and demonstrate on-camera. Each class session will focus on a particular stage of the process, and students are encouraged to work along with the instructors and ask questions in real time. For students unable to attend the live on Sundays, a recording of each class session will be available for 7 days until it is replaced with the subsequent week’s video. That way, there’s a full week available to get caught up if you miss anything, or to review any concepts presented.

A high-quality photo reference of the model will be made available to all students at the beginning of the class. This will be the same reference the instructors will be using, and as such, we’ll all be able to work with the same model, from the same point of view – something not possible with traditional on-ground classes with a live model. Another advantage of this format, is students will be able to work on their portraits between classes, although we recommend not getting too far ahead of the demo each week.