Ladies and gentlemen, I’m thrilled to present to you my most popular art and coloring course COLOR THEORY, and it’s now available on Udemy.
LEARN TO COLOR LIKE THIS!
Understanding color isn’t just an art form, it’s science, and it dates back to antiquity. Upon completing of this course, your coloring will get a facelift. Those who see your new coloring pages will assume you went to an art university and know all the secrets of the masters.
The four long lessons that make up this course are presented in many short segments.
PRICELESS CONTENT
In this course, I will teach you University-level material, and A LOT of it. I went to an art University in New York City to get my degree in fine art. There, my class on color theory lasted four months, and the content was applied to the rest of my art journey until graduation.
I’m offering you the same level of education, all packed into four easy-to follow lessons, with course material that you get to keep.
After completing this course, you will never stress over picking colors again. You will gain confidence in your art that only comes with knowledge and practice. You will learn everything there is to know about the science of color, including various color models, ways to group colors, value, saturation, tints, tones, shades, mood and how to set it.
Together we’ll study the works of masters for reference, and review your own creations. Together, we’ll make YOU a master.
SO! If you’re ready to step up your coloring game, I’ll see you in class.
In all my time drawing coloring pages and teaching coloring techniques, I learned quite a bit about the psychology behind skin tone coloring and why so many people struggle with it.
Click on the picture to join my course Realistic Skin Tone Coloring on Udemy
Before we jump into why skin tones give colorists the most grief, let’s examine human faces and how we interact with them.
After all, without faces we wouldn’t have skin tones to worry about at all.
Research shows us that human beings have by far the strongest emotional reaction to human faces over anything else out there. Yes, even over puppies.
Regardless of how you feel about people, regardless of whose face you’re looking at, if it’s human your emotional response will spike dramatically compared to the response your brain exhibits when you look at even the most beautiful of sunsets.
This means two things for artists and colorists.
1. Using portraits in your art will get your work more noticed and interacted with.
2. Improving your portrait drawing and coloring skills is essential.
But why would we struggle with drawing and coloring a subject matter that’s so near and dear to our hearts? Shouldn’t we be experts at human faces if we’re so connected with them?
Quite the opposite, in fact.
Because we’re so familiar with the human face, we no longer see it for all that it is, but rather see it in caricature. There’s a huge element of recognition, rather than observation, at play.
When you look at another person in front of you, you rarely (unless you’re a face-obsessed artist) study their bone structure and the way the shadows happen to be playing on their eyelids as they move and blink. Instead you see – young, old, tired, goofy, attractive, awkward, smiling, frowning, etc…
In our minds we reduce human faces to the very basic classifications that are relevant to the current interaction.
For instance, if you’re pulled over by a traffic cop, you probably see a towering, intimidating, and frowning individual, and you probably won’t recognize him should you run into him days later at a baseball game.
Your mind just turned him into a caricature of a scary authority figure.
However, if you’re out on a date, you’re probably seeing a warm, happy, smiling face, and are trying to imagine all the other positive posibilies of continuing the interaction.
Obviously, some of us have had quite the opposite experiences, but you get the idea.
In either case, you’re NOT studying the exact shade of the skin tone on the left side of the face as the sunlight casts a shadow on it. That’s just not how our minds naturally work.
We see people, not skin tones.
When drawing and coloring, we revert to our natural perception of human faces – the emotional perception, forgetting all about light, shadow, and color.
In the coloring world, the biggest mistake I see colorists make on portraits is not using enough color variation. Many people try to find that one perfect pencil to match the desired skin tone, and that’s just not how it works.
In my 6-hour video course Skin Tone Mastery, I provide students with my personally developed color palettes for a whole range of skin tones, AND teach them to build their own color schemes for any skin tone out there.
Click on the picture to join this course on Udemy
If you’re a colorist, YouTube color-alongs will only get you so far. There simply isn’t an exact guide for every possibility out there.
I believe in teaching a student how to fish, rather than giving them a fish.
Come join one of my professional, university-level art courses, and arm yourself with skills that you can apply to any kind of skin tone coloring. Once and for all.
How would you like to make your coloring pages or drawings look like they actually glow?!
Now you can!
My new 6.5-hour intensive art course on Fantasy Glow Effects will light up your colored pencil work forever.
TOP NOTCH CONTENT
The course is divided into four sections: bioluminescence, potions, lanterns, and fairies, to cover all of your glow effect needs.
Each of the four lessons consists of several bite-sized video lessons covering shading technique, color selection, and offering three separate demos.
I am a firm believer in arming my students with skills to approach all kinds of coloring in a given category, rather than just showing you how to color along with me.
The students who have already go through this course are doing just that. I see my coloring technique light up different pages by various artists, and it’s the best reward a teacher can ask for.
I can’t wait to share my secrets with you as well.
I’ve been teaching art and coloring for years. You may be familiar with my free art and coloring tutorials on YouTube, or my university-level art courses on Udemy, or perhaps you’re a patron subscribed to the Coloring Club or the Doodle Club tier.
Or you may be completely new to the Lisa Mitrokhin universe. In either case, you will be delighted to discover that you can now take my How to Color Skin Tones and a few other courses for free on Skillshare.
Click on the image to go directly to this course
But wait, there’s more! 😀
When you use this LINK to join Skillshare, and my course, you get a WHOLE MONTH free of Skillshare use.
That’s INSANE!
There’re thousands of amazing, professional, and knowledgable creators on Skillshare. I personally use it all the time for my own research and education.
So, what are you waiting for?!
JOIN!
Follow me!
Take my course. Leave me a kick-ass review, and enjoy the endless knowledge offered by Skillshare.
Do you like to sketch, doodle, and draw? Would you like to mingle with other doodlers, and learn from a professional artist along the way? Great! Join The Doodle Club. as one of my Patreon tiers.
WHAT IS THE DOODLE CLUB
The DOODLE CLUB is a monthly subscription to a virtual classroom, with advanced content that I never share on YouTube or other public platforms.
Every month in Doodle Club I share a newly recorded drawing video, with emphasis on free-hand technique. My pre-med background and general obsession with anatomy allows me to dive deeper into the structure of my subjects and explain WHY something looks the way that it does, rather than only presenting a set of step-by step instructions. When I teach how to draw big cats, for instance, I want my students to be able to draw ALL big cats in any situation, not just to be able to copy one of my drawings.
Video lessons are recorded and uploaded for students to watch as webinars on their own time.
“I’M JUST A BEGINNER. CAN I JOIN?”
Absolutely! You are welcome, you’ll have a great time and learn a lot. In my lessons, I focus on approach above technique. This is a place to learn to let go, to loosen up your hand, and to learn to see objects and subjects in a different light, which will allow you to draw more freely on your own. This is a great place to get started if you don’t have much experience.
You will see noticeable improvement every month. The longer you stay, the more you will learn.
“I ALREADY KNOW HOW TO DRAW, WILL I BENEFIT FROM THIS?”
It depends on how advanced and how comfortable you are. Are you a pro who can draw anything, free-hand, and then perfect it to look photorealistic? If so, you probably already know everything I teach here.
If however, you draw often and you draw well, but your proportion on animals just seem off, or your portraits don’t really resemble their real-life models, or you would like learn to be able to draw more without the aid of photography or relying on tracing – THIS CLUB IS FOR YOU.
HOW TO JOIN
Simply click on the button below and select the Patreon tier called Doodle Club.
If you like to draw or color and want to take your skin tone colored pencil work to a whole new level – my SKIN TONE MASTERY course on Udemy is for YOU!
In this 3.5-hour course I will teach you my technique to achieve cream, peaches, caramel, toffee, and espresso skin tones. Each section (or lesson) focuses on a new skin tone and contains several short video lessons, as well as coloring pages to practice on, and my personal color charts.
GET EXCLUSIVE CONTENT AND KNOWLEDGE
The color charts that I designed for each skin tone are one of the most desired elements of the course, but even that’s not the course’s greatest value.
To prepare you for all the skin tone coloring possibilities out there, I teach you how to make your own color palettes for ANY skin tone!
Every step of the way I will guide you with visual demos, my choices of colors, my shading and layering technique and much more.
For each skin tone I offer my own personal, already proven, color chart that your’e welcome to use on your own coloring.
But that wasn’t enough for me. I want to teach you how to make your own artistic decisions, so I will also teach you how to build your own color charts for any skin tone you may wish to color.
In addition to printable charts and games, every lesson comes with two versions of a portrait illustration, making a total of 10 unique coloring character pages for you to practice on.
This is a collection of my hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations, based on Inktober 2021 prompts. Inktober is a yearly word association drawing game played by thousands of people all around the world.
This year I approached Inktober in a unique way: I offered my audience a chance to actually appear in my art as characters. For instance, a colorist named Crystal Miller booked the first day with an assigned word (prompt) “Crystal,” and she volunteered her two girls to be featured. I drew the kids growing out of a crystal cluster. In this way the entire book was created with actual people (and in some cases their pets) as characters.
The trickiest part was to make every participant somehow reflect their assigned word. Some people knew the exact prompt they wanted, while others just gave me a general idea of their self image, and left me to make it work with the available words. As an extra challenge I set out to do the whole collection in a steampunk style.
For every day of October, I released a photo of a drawing, done in markers and fine-liners. That is thirty one drawings. The photos below are of my original drawings and a teaser for what will be inside the colorable published book. Enjoy the pics.
Remember that time I thought it was a good idea to not just create a new free-hand pen and ink drawing every day for a month, but to also produce a high-quality time-lapse video for each of them? Yeah.. that was Inktober 2020.
2020 was the first time I joined Inktober. I was hesitant. You may have heard.
But it turned out to be an extraordinary experience, it helped me deal with a severe case of burnout, inspired me to create and publish my now best-selling adult coloring art book Inkandescence, and today I’m finally ready to let go of the original drawings as well.
Are you the true fan who will get your hands on it? If so, I’d love to hear from you. If you buy this very personal work of art, please shoot me a message and say hello.
I discovered Corel Painter over a decade ago when I was still a tattoo artist. I wanted a faster and easier way to manipulate, twist, and shape my designs, and to be able to present the proposals to my clients mapped onto actual photos of them.
My digitally painted tattoo proposal.My proposed design in the process of being inked on skin.
I’m not a vector gal. Never have been. Never will be. I’m a painter, an illustrator, a tattooist, and much more. I’m very hands-on. I needed a program that would allow me to use my drawing hand the way that I use it with brushes, pencils and a tattoo gun. Corel Painter is the closest thing to actual painting that I’ve been able to find to this day.
Sometimes I just paint for fun. I created this character just for practice and as a vacation from work.
My first purchase after Corel Painter was a designated drawing screen. I went with a Wacom Cintiq. I use it still.
To transform all of my pen and ink art into colorable adult pages for my newest book Inkandescence, I worked in Corel Painter on a Wacom 24″ drawing monitor.
The first version of Corel that I got was Corel Painter X. I used that version for about eight years before upgrading to CP18, and today I’m enjoying Corel Painter 2020.
“Wish you were here” – one of my first digital paintings done in Corel Painter X
These days I create a lot of line art and grey-scale colorable art for the adult coloring community. Frequently, I actually create a full color digital painting, and then transform it into a coloring page.
One of my recent digital paintings that later became a coloring page
One of my favorite things to paint in Corel is portraits. Here’re some of my latest that I’m preparing for a new Udemy course on skin tones.
My latest portrait work in Corel Painter 2020Another portrait done in Corel Painter 2020
As much as I love it, I don’t always work on my giant Wacom screen. Some nights I like to curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and an ipad, and work on my designs on a smaller scale.
There’s a popular misconception that making art digitally is somehow cheating. This way of thinking comes from a lack of knowledge. People who are not familiar with digital painting software assume that to create digital paintings we punch in a bunch of computer commands, press some buttons and BOOM – art appears. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When I paint digitally, I use all the same skill sets as I do when drawing on paper, painting on canvas, or inking on skin. What the program does is it gives me a boost in magical powers. For instance, I don’t need to wait for paint layers to dry, yet I can customize my brushes and even pressure sensitivity. I can work on a virtual canvas of any size, while in reality I’m limited by physical space. I can work in media forms that are not available to me in real life. And my ultimate favorite – I NEVER have to clean my brushes.
I started using a painter program when I was already an accomplished artist, as a means to speed up and fine-tune the delivery of my art, so that I can spend more time on the creative process and less time on, well, watching paint dry.
Working digitally did not prevent me from continuing to make classic analog art. I draw and paint daily, and find that the two ways (digital and analog) only strengthen one another.
If you’re a creator, give digital painting a shot. There’re lots of programs out there. Find the one that’s best for you.
Setting my very personal and vulnerable art, Inkandescence, into the world as an interactive art book was, to say the least, terrifying.
“Lisa, this could be your best book yet. I think it’s genius!” – Dee Myles (fan and artist)
I was fully prepared for trolls, haters, and critics, but am pleasantly surprised by the warm reception.
Dune Dancer colored by Tiffany Kleinsteuber
“I’ve watched you bloom from your very first book all the way through to now. It has been a privilege and a trip to watch and to take part in it. I always knew you were a great artist, but you only grow better! Exquisite art! Bravo Lisa! Bravo!” – Madame Laurie (fan, colorist, art student)
The people who are already coloring the pages, have much praise as well. I found that many colorists enjoy working with colored pencils directly on top of the dark photographs that are featured in the book, while others prefer the grey-scale line art versions of the pages. Likewise, my digital colorists are having a blast.
I’m a realist though. I fully understand that this book is not for everyone. For some it’s too racy. For some it’s too dark. For some it’s just too detailed. I’ve learned a long time ago that if you try to please everyone, you will please no one. My aim with Inkandescence wasn’t to release a popular and “safe” book. There’re plenty of those out on the market already. My book is for those who are like me: artistic, daring, different, somewhat on the dark side but not stereotypically gothic, and ultimately positive and energetic.
I’m thrilled that those who don’t fancy this work, just walk on by without leaving hurtful comments, while whose who appreciate the work take the time to let me know. Granted, it’s only been a week since the book’s release.
I’m thrilled to see how new audiences react in a few weeks when Inkandescence will be reviewed by multiple YouTubers. Stay tuned for those updates and announcements.
Hide and Seek colored by Tiffany Kleinsteuber
Most of all, I enjoy seeing the colorings and reading about your interpretations of my drawings.
I hope to hear from YOU.
Join my free private community TALM, and share your art and thoughts with the rest of us.
Join the TALM family
Eye Candy colored by Mel Flay
Stay dark. Stay humorous. Stay positive. These attributes don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
