Digital portrait

What changes first of all is the sequence. People stop picking color with the eyedropper off the reference: first the value relationships are taken as large shapes, then a limited palette is laid over them, and only at the end do the highlight and the accents appear. Color theory for artists works here as a constraint, not as a reference book: you have chosen a triad, now hold to it until the picture comes together. After a few goes, your hand reaches for the neighboring hue on the wheel instead of the same one, only darker.

Muddy color starts in two places. The first: the shadow is painted with the same color as the light, knocked down with the brightness slider, and the object then looks like plastic, because in the shadow there is neither reflected light nor a change of temperature. The second: complementary colors are mixed at equal saturation, and instead of contrast you get a brown blob. The week on lighting and colored light covers exactly what hue the highlight, the light, the halftone, the form shadow and the cast shadow should be under a warm source, and the lesson with the oranges shows the same rule on a simple object: if orange has appeared, then blue is obliged to appear somewhere nearby.

The first thing to watch is the lesson on the basics of digital painting or the stylized still life: they show how to paint in Procreate from the first fill to the final touches on a setup you can follow. Then week two of the marathon on warm and cool, and after it week three on color schemes. Portraits are worth putting off: in a face a mistake in the color scheme reads as unhealthy skin rather than as a deliberate device. The timelapse of the woman’s portrait with hands in a cool scheme is better opened once you understand what is happening, twenty hours of work are compressed into eight minutes there, including the eyes, which were repainted five times.

The section does not teach the software. The interface, the layers and brush settings are shown along the way; there is no separate course on the tool here, just as there is no comparison of tablets. And despite the name of the section, a large share of the classes are done on still life and landscape: color is set on simple objects, and the portrait is taken on once the color scheme already obeys you.