INVENTIVE COLOR, INTERPRETIVE STYLE
$129.00
- Artist – Milena Guberinic
- 9+ Hours of content
- Lifetime Access/Downloadable Content
- Private FB Group
- Course Price – $129
- All Sales Final
Description
Want to Learn How to Paint Loosely and Emotionally—Without Losing the Form of the Face?
Join Milena Guberinic in Inventive Color, Interpretive Style – The Watercolor Portrait, where you'll learn to paint expressive, emotionally rich portraits using watercolor. Milena shares her approach to working from black and white photo references, using bold, unexpected colors to move beyond realism. Her abstract, interpretive style is full of feeling, but this course is about helping you develop your own voice. You'll learn to see value clearly, apply watercolor with both intention and freedom, and use inventive color while maintaining structure. The course includes foundational lessons and full portrait demos that walk you through Milena’s process. A special lesson featuring a vintage photo of her mother shows how personal stories can shape your work. Milena encourages experimentation and self-trust throughout. This is not about perfection—it's about expression.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
By the end of this course students will have an understanding of the following concepts:
- Apply different watercolor techniques like layering, blending, and loose brushwork.
- Read light and dark values in black-and-white photos.
- Identify warm and cool colors.
- Understand how color works in light and dark skin tones.
- Choose expressive colors instead of literal ones.
- Keep portraits structured, even with bold color choices.
- Paint loosely while suggesting form.
- Create expressive, cohesive watercolor portraits.
ENROLL TODAY!
Lifetime Access - Download All Content
Cost - $129
DESCRIPTION OF LESSONS
The course begins with foundational lessons that set the stage for expressive portrait work in watercolor. Milena first introduces various watercolor application techniques—wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, glazing, dry brushing, and lifting—explaining how each can be used to create softness, texture, and visual interest. She then moves into reading value in black-and-white portraits, helping you simplify complex faces into shapes and structure through value studies. Building on this, you’ll explore how to make bold, personal color choices that still convey form, learning how to translate value into color and select palettes that reflect mood, temperament, or subject matter.
With those tools in place, the course shifts into full portrait demonstrations to bring everything together. Milena walks you through her process in painting a male subject, showing how she balances structure with intuition. She then focuses on painting dark skin tones, highlighting how light behaves on darker surfaces and how to build depth with saturated, transparent color. In the final lesson, she works from a vintage photo of her mother, incorporating hands and storytelling to illustrate how personal meaning can shape your artistic choices. This culminating piece weaves together all elements of the course—value, color, composition, and expressive style—while inviting you to consider how your own life and memories might inform your art.
ENROLL TODAY!
Lifetime Access - Download All Content
Cost - $129
MEET MILENA GUBERINIC - ARTIST/INSTRUCTOR
Milena is a Serbian-born visual artist based in Canada, working primarily in watercolor to explore themes of memory, femininity, identity, and perception. Her symbolic paintings focus on lived experiences of chronic illness, grief, inherited trauma, and displacement. Drawing on a background in psychology, Japanese language and culture, and fashion design, Milena’s practice is layered, intuitive, and rooted in experimentation.
Largely self-directed, her work emerges from intensive independent study, mentorships, and a deep engagement with material. She often paints from memory or life rather than photographs, letting the paint lead the way and allowing for blooming, dissolving, and staining that mirror the instability of her subject matter. Watercolor, with its capacity for both precision and unpredictability, becomes a tool for expressing tensions between fragility, force, and control.
Milena’s work has been featured in numerous international and national juried exhibitions and competitions, including the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolor, Women in Watercolor, and many shows with the Federation of Canadian Artists. Her paintings have appeared in Artists Magazine, Splash 26: Best of Watercolor, and Art and Color 365, and have earned two BoldBrush Outstanding Watercolor Awards, among others.
Milena is also an illustrator, with work published in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor: Age of the Wolf and a series of fantasy novels by Thomas B. Matthews.
MORE ARTWORK BY MILENA
PRIVATE GROUP FOR THIS COURSE
There is a private FB group for this course. Once you are signed up for the course, you can access the FB group where only you and other students signed up for the course will have access. Keep in mind, teachers are only active the first four weeks. After that, some may be involved, while others are not. We are looking forward to seeing your artwork!
COURSE SUPPLIES
Below is a list of the supplies that I will be using for the projects in this course. However, you are always encouraged to use what you have on hand.
SUBSTRATE
- I often paint on cellulose paper, but you’re welcome to use 100% cotton, a cotton-cellulose blend, or full cellulose. A good middle ground is Winsor & Newton’s 25% cotton paper
PAINT
Make sure you have a good mix of warm and cool yellows, reds, blues, and browns.
- Here’s what’s in my Mijello palette (not required in full):
- Lemon Yellow
- Permanent Yellow Light
- Naples Yellow/Jaune Brilliant
- Permanent Yellow Deep
- Yellow Orange
- Orange, Vermilion
- Permanent Red
- Permanent Rose
- Rose Madder
- Crimson Lake
- Opera
- Yellow Ochre Transparent
- Light Red
- Raw Umber
- Burnt Sienna
- Red Brown
- Vandyke Brown
- Sepia
- Greenish Yellow
- Yellow Green
- Sap Green
- Viridian
- Olive Green
- Hooker’s Green
- Vandyke Green
- Cerulean Blue
- Blue Grey
- Peacock Blue
- Cobalt Blue No. 1
- Prussian Blue
- Indigo
- Mijello Blue
- Ultramarine Deep
- Permanent Violet
- Red Violet
- Ivory Black
- Yellow Grey
- Titanium White
PAINTBRUSHES
- I use an assortment of synthetic rounds
DRAWING
- I recommend anything from HB to 2B. Avoid the H-range, as they tend to scratch the paper.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON ACCESSING CLASSES AND SELLING WORK CREATED IN THIS COURSE:
**Upon purchasing your course, you will be asked to create an account and go through the purchase process (even if the cost is $0 for a free course). If you have already created an account, after purchase your course will IMMEDIATELY be available under “LOGIN” at the top right-hand of karabullockart.com.
**If your course does not show up, please email us at karabullockart@gmail.com
**Due to the nature of the immediate availability of the course, all purchases are nonrefundable.
**Please talk to the artist of the course about his/her policy on selling artwork created in this course prior to selling any works created during course. Some artists will allow it, while others do not. Thank you for your support.
2 reviews for INVENTIVE COLOR, INTERPRETIVE STYLE
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carlos chua (verified owner) –
I have enjoyed this learning experience! One of the best!
Megan Lotuaco (verified owner) –
This is the first time water color process made sense to me!! Thank you so much for this course. I really appreciate that you taught a variety of skin tones and both portraits as well as body/clothing. Very valuable instruction.