Description

The difficulty with learning oil painting isn’t necessarily the oil paint itself, it’s making too many decisions at once.

If you want to paint from life, there’s quite a lot to organise before you make your first brushstroke.

You need a subject that works, you need to arrange it into a composition, you need an easel, your palette and somewhere comfortable to work, and then you need to think about the lighting.

Natural light can be beautiful, but it’s constantly changing. Shadows move, colours shift, and something that looked perfect when you started can look completely different a couple of hours later.

You might wonder whether the shape is right, whether a colour is too warm, whether a shadow is dark enough, or why an object still doesn’t look three-dimensional. For an experienced painter, many of these decisions have become almost automatic, but when you’re just beginning, each one requires your full attention.

That’s why painting directly from life can sometimes feel much harder than expected. You’re not learning one new skill. You’re trying to coordinate several new skills at once.

So for this course, I wanted to take a different approach.

Instead of throwing everything at you at once, we break the painting process into manageable stages.

• We work from a printed reference image, so the composition and lighting remain completely consistent throughout the painting. You won’t have to race against changing daylight or recreate the still life setup every time you want to continue.
• We begin with a gridded pencil drawing, so you can forget colour and paint handling for a moment and focus on the proportions, shapes, and placement of the objects.
• Then we introduce a monochrome underpainting, called a grisaille. This lets you focus purely on value and see how the pattern of lights and darks creates the illusion of form, without also having to find the perfect colour.

Only once those foundations are in place do we introduce colour.

Isolated colour swatches make colour mixing much easier to judge.

Rather than looking at the whole scene and wondering, “What colour is that?”, you can compare one small area at a time and ask simpler questions. Is it lighter or darker? Warmer or cooler? More saturated or more neutral?

You can mix, compare and adjust.

Along the way, you’re also becoming familiar with the oils themselves. You start to understand how they move under the brush, how much paint you need, how colours mix, how slowly the paint dries, and how one layer can build on another.

So instead of trying to learn drawing, composition, value, colour mixing, and oil painting technique all at once, we break the process down. 

And that’s really the aim of the course. It’s not to keep you from painting from life. It’s to give you enough experience with each individual part of the process that, when you do set up your easel in front of a still life, you’re no longer trying to solve everything for the first time.

What’s in the Course?

• 1 x  Still life painting from start to finish, based in the studio, working from a reference image. ✅
• 5-Lesson curriculum: (split into separate chapters that follow sequentially.) ✅
• Step-by-step oil painting lessons that you can follow at your own pace.
• A clear, easy-to-follow process for building the painting in stages.
• A drawing template to help you overcome the blank-canvas hurdle and start with confidence.
• Downloadable reference JPEG images, line drawings, and a full materials list.✅
• LIFETIME ACCESS to video lessons, download on separate devices, keep forever.✅
• Over 2+ hrs of detailed video instruction so you can follow along at your own pace.✅