Category: Minilessons

The visual world offers up infinite variety and challenges to the representational artist. Our imaginations pale next to natures’ variety! We have to choose, edit and compare. Before you can even put pen to paper, brush to canvas you have

I really believe anyone can learn to paint if you can hold a brush or a pastel and you can learn to see sensitively. It’s not about talent and it’s definitely not about having all the right stuff! Fact: your

I’ll bet there isn’t an art instructor that hasn’t spent some time preaching the benefits of doing thumbnail sketches and most students resist them. Why do we preach and why do students resist? Well let’s talk about the resistance first.

Sunrise is filled with promise. Sunset is often a time of reflection. Each carries its own poetry, emotion and opportunity for expression. But is there a difference other than the significance we let our minds attach to them? Technically, no!

Roads are arteries connecting us to one another. Without them, we’d be isolated from one another! They have meaning to us as we travel them to visit places near and far. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is just

So much of oil painting is mixing. Accurately mixing color depends on seeing color accurately. We need the right surface to mix color on. We also need to have a surface that allows us to mix paint to the proper

As a painter, one of the big challenges is to mix and paint color accurately. This can be a big challenge for the beginner for a number of reasons, not least of which is that our direct observation can sometimes

https://youtu.be/c-RhSD8RaDY I must admit to being a bit of a wimp when it comes to plein air painting. I love, love, love it, don’t get me wrong, but I need a little bit of help out there! Come on it’s

I just got back from my fabulous trip to Fiji and it was amazing. I have note painted palm trees so it was quite an interesting challenge to capture the foliage there. The landscape was so different than the north

Well, obviously! A world without red? Red sneakers, red house, red flowers, red stool. Anything I can get! This year, I painted my house red. It makes me feel good. For half a minute I thought about painting it grey