Why skin tone coloring can be so tricky?

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.

Join the Skin Tone Mastery course HERE

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.

Learn from me and thousands of professional instructors for free!

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.

I’ll see you in class.

Master SKIN TONES with colored pencils

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.