Tag: Monday Morning Art School

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Monday Morning Art School: why a repeatable painting process matters

Mather Point at dawn (Grand Canyon), oil on canvasboard, 9X12, , $696 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

I put a premium on repeatable process. That’s not because I’m rigid; it’s because a consistent painting process delivers consistent results. Every noted artist in art history has had one.

Study the working methods of masters and you’ll see variation, of course. Claude Monet worked serially, revisiting the same subject in shifting light to explore optics, color and atmosphere. John Singer Sargent was famous for his bravura brushwork, but beneath that flair was a disciplined structure of drawing and value control. Georgia O’Keeffe simplified and distilled her subjects through careful design and a deliberate studio practice.

They had different approaches, different temperaments and lived in different places and times, yet all were grounded in method.

Grand Canyon at sunset, oil on canvasboard, 9X12.

The bones don’t change

Color and design principles don’t change. They’re the bones of painting. You can glaze or paint alla prima, work from life or from photos, but you cannot escape the fundamentals of color harmony, value structure, and composition.

How you get there, however, will become increasingly tailored to your own painting approach and personality as you grow and evolve. These are workflow decisions. Over time, you will discover which sequence of steps makes you clear-headed instead of flustered.

Learn a process before you break it

If you’re serious about improving your painting, find a teacher who suits your personality. That doesn’t mean someone whose finished paintings you admire, but someone whose method makes sense to your brain.

Learn and treasure that teacher’s process (and enjoy learning while you’re at it). Practice it until it is second nature. Build muscle memory around it. A structured painting process gives you something to fall back on when you’re tired, discouraged, or staring at a blank canvas.

That is how artists move from dabbling to building a body of work.

Just as with painting style, your process will evolve over time. You’ll streamline steps and discover shortcuts that don’t sacrifice quality. That evolution isn’t rebellion; it’s maturity.

Grand Canyon, late morning, 8X16, oil on archival linenboard, $722 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

Haphazard in, haphazard out

There is a pernicious myth in art that spontaneity equals authenticity. But haphazard approaches deliver haphazard paintings. Yes, there will be a few happy accidents. Chance always plays a role in creative work. Serendipity is real.

But if you rely on accident as your primary strategy, your success rate will be low. A consistent painting workflow gives you a framework. Within that framework, you can take risks. You can experiment with brushwork or color temperature or edges. You can push yourself compositionally.

Without a framework, you are reinventing the wheel every time you paint. That’s exhausting, and it makes it nearly impossible to create a cohesive portfolio or professional body of work.

Pensive 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Build your own normal

Adopt a repeatable art process. Follow it faithfully. Track what works. Notice where you stumble. Refine gently.

Over months and years, that method will bend toward your temperament. It will begin to reflect your visual priorities and technical strengths. Eventually, it will feel less like a borrowed system and more like your own studio rhythm.

That’s when you’ve found your normal. And from that normal—steady, disciplined, evolving—you’ll produce not just better paintings, but a happier, more confident artistic life.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: perfection in painting is impossible

Camden Harbor from Curtis Island, oil on canvas, $2782 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

The thing that trips you up will almost always be unexpected. It won’t be the sky or figure you feared. It will be something small and stubborn. If you let it, that tiny snag can hijack your whole painting. But in painting, as in life, perfection is a pernicious mirage that can keep us from trying or finishing anything.

The ugly side of perfection

We talk about perfection as if it’s synonymous with beauty. It isn’t.

Think about the strange results of extreme cosmetic surgery: tight faces, overfilled lips, pneumatic breasts. Enormous sums of money are spent in our culture chasing youth. And yet, we gravitate toward faces etched with experience and humanity: Corrie ten Boom, Mother Teresa, Georgia O’Keeffe.

We value bravura brushwork in part because it photographs well for social media. Quieter virtues like solid drafting, subtle value control, and compositional integrity might be dismissed as dull. But bravura without structure is just noise.

Spring Allee, oil on archival canvasboard, 14X18, $1594.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Cultural blind spots in painting

One of the great conceits of our times is that modern ‘rational’ people have fewer blind spots than our benighted ancestors.

We are all the sum of our upbringing and our culture. That includes aesthetic preconceptions. We think we’re being objective when we judge art, but all judgments are freighted with assumptions.

In the studio, blind spots can keep us from seeing real problems. For example, we value color but denigrate drawing, so we polish color harmonies while ignoring bad drafting. Sometimes we can’t see the issue at all, because it doesn’t fit our internal narrative of what matters.

Brooding Skies, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard, $522 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The moment

The goal is not perfection in the abstract. It’s getting as close as we can for the moment of that painting. It might stretch over hours, days, or even weeks. It’s the point at which the painting coheres under the specific conditions in which it was made: skill level, materials, emotional state, light, deadline and more.

The real danger is not imperfection. It’s failing to recognize your achievement in that moment. If you keep telling yourself, “I suck,” you’ll never get better. You’re trying to fix something that ain’t broke. That usually means turning a resolved work into a labored one. Instead, set it aside and see what it tells you in a year.

The four paintings I included in this post are all examples of work I thought failed at the time I painted them, but that I quite like today.

A painting exists as a success or failure within its time and context. Your job is to nurture it into clarity, not force it into something it was never meant to be.

Hare Bay, Newfoundland, 12X16, $1159 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

One minor variable

I am making my daughter’s wedding dress, and was recently tripped up by something I never thought would be a problem. I’ve worked with tulle and beading before, but I’m using a ‘new to me’ sewing machine. The pearls kept catching, so I kept stopping and clipping them farther from the seams. What I expected to take an hour stretched into two days. Despite my great care there are pinholes where I nicked the tulle removing pearls. Which means a fine mending job.

That happens in painting, too. A small, unanticipated issue can derail momentum. You can’t eliminate all variables; you must accept that they’re part of the process.

Perfection in painting is impossible. But presence, discipline, and the humility to recognize the moment of enough? These are always within reach.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: painterly, loose brushwork

Marshall Point Rock Study
Marshall Point, oil on archival canvasboard, 9X12, $696, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Today is Candlemas, one of the oldest feasts in Christendom. It came to North America through the Pennsylvania Dutch as Groundhog Day. That’s also the midpoint of astronomical winter.

Northerners know the whole “six more weeks of winter” thing is hooey. Winter ends at the spring equinox; this year that’s March 20. Yes, that’s six weeks away, but we’ve been known to have snow into May.

Traditionally, Candlemas is observed by eating crepes because there’s nothing like carb-loading this time of year. I plan on having wild blueberries with mine.

Now, to work

Two paintings by Lauren Hammond, courtesy of the artist.

In last week’s Zoom class, Lauren Hammond showed two paintings, above. One was a careful study of storm clouds over Lake Winnipesaukee. The other was a small abstraction of the same subject. The first is more factual; the second is more tempestuous. “It took me fifteen minutes,” she protested when I told her I loved the abstraction. That’s not true. She should include the hours it took her to do the carefully-realized painting as well, because all simplification rests on getting it right in the first place.

Loose is not easier

Loose brushwork isn’t sloppiness. Instead, it’s a confident economy that only comes after one truly understands the composition, values and color relationships.

Loose brushwork looks effortless because the artist has already figured out what matters and what doesn’t. He or she has internalized the way shapes interact, the rhythm of edges and the push and pull of light and dark. Once that happens, they can let go and paint with abandon. Mark-making is no longer tentative; it is the result of decisive choice. That’s the heart of painterliness.

Sometimes painting students seek looseness before they’re ready. You cannot break rules that you haven’t yet mastered. Without good structure, amorphous marks just look confused. True looseness is an informed choice. It’s a freedom that arises from discipline, not in spite of it.

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor on Yupo, ~24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Clarity

You can’t be genuinely loose until you are utterly clear on the subject you’re painting. Before you add bravura brushwork, you must establish the composition’s anchor points: the big shapes, the value relationships that give your painting weight and coherence and the color harmonies. These are the scaffolding of painting and can never be ignored. Build well and you give yourself the freedom to break out in dynamic ways.

This is just like learning a language. First you master vocabulary and grammar. Only after you are comfortable with structure can you play with idiom and nuance. Without that basis there’s no poetry in either painting or language.

Fog over Whiteface Mountain, 11X14, $1087 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Good juicy, gestural marks aren’t by accident. They should be well-placed in the context of the composition and support the goals of the painting. This can be intuitive or subliminal, but it’s always the result of experience. The experienced painter knows when to let loose and when to hold back.

If you’re ready to move beyond tentative marks and learn to paint with clarity and confidence, I’ve created a class specifically to guide you. In Painterliness, Looseness and Bravura Brushwork, we break down the principles that allow expressive looseness to emerge. You’ll learn how to see what truly matters in your painting, and how to let go with purpose and vitality. This Zoom class runs on Tuesday evenings from 6-9 PM, from February 24 to April 7, and is strictly limited in size so that I can give each of you the attention you deserve.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: retraining your eyes

Autumn farm, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

When I’m bored or stressed, I doodle a human eye. I’ve been doing this since I was a little girl, and my drawing has (naturally) gotten better. Still, I’m not really drawing an eye, but my idea of an eye.

This is fine when doodling, but not so good when painting from life. There has been a red boat in Rockport harbor for years. It used to be Becca & Meagan, but in 2017 it was replaced by Hemingway. Over several weeks, I corrected Ann when she drew it. Finally, exasperated, she pointed out to me that I was wrong. I had looked at Becca & Meagan for so long that I was no longer seeing what was there.

Most trees are several times as tall as their canopy is wide. Proportional to their canopy, their trunks are mere slivers. Yet painting students often shorten trees and broaden their trunks. This is because we’re anthropocentric. We perceive their trunks as up close, their canopies as far away. Our tree-shaped idea is shaped by our experience and perception.

Southern Beech, 9X12, oil on Baltic birch, $696 includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

Drawing based on experience and assumptions feels fluent. These are well-trodden pathways in the brain. Stepping back, however, we realize that our drawing falls short of reality.

(For the record, I’m all for drawing from the mind’s eye outward, but that’s a different discipline, and it requires the best drawing chops of all.)

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Retraining your eyes is a lifelong practice

Our everyday vision edits aggressively, both for efficiency and sanity. Any activity that requires fast reflexes would otherwise be impossible. Our brains quickly name things and move on to deal with them.

Painterly seeing, on the other hand, must be the exact opposite of this. The brain has to be tricked into slowing down. It must replace instant recognition with relationships: light against shadow, warm against cool, hard edges dissolving into soft ones, shapes locking together like pieces of a puzzle. When we don’t do this, we default to clichés: green leaves, brown rocks, blue skies.

As my confession above tells you, even experienced painters get visually lazy. We rely on habits that once served us well but now quietly flatten our work. The cure is not more paint, better brushes or a new medium. The cure is learning and relearning how to actually see.

Painting improves fastest when seeing improves first. Brushwork follows perception. Color follows value. Confidence follows clarity. When painters struggle, it’s rarely because they can’t paint, because that’s actually the easy part. It’s because they aren’t seeing what’s there.

How to See Like a Painter, my Zoom class starting February 23, is designed to interrupt symbolic thinking and rebuild visual awareness from the ground up. We focus on how painters analyze scenes, simplify complexity and organize chaos into clear, compelling compositions.

The Whole Enchilada, 12X16, oil on archival canvas, $1159 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental United States.

This isn’t about copying reality or painting tighter. It’s about painting truer to the experience of light and spatial relationships. If you’ve ever said, “It looked better in real life,” this class is for you.

Whether you work in oil, watercolor, acrylic or pastel, the fundamentals of painterly seeing apply. If you’re ready to retrain your eyes, question your assumptions, and sharpen the most important tool you have—your perception—I’d love to work with you. There’s more information here. (For my upcoming Tuesday class on painterliness, see here.)

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: desert lessons

Cliffs, 12X12, oil on birch, private collection.

Arizona (especially Sedona’s red-rock country) looks simple from a distance. Big shapes. Big color. Big sky. That apparent simplicity is exactly what makes it hard to paint well.

Every landscape has its own rules, and the desert is particularly unforgiving to painters who arrive armed with assumptions instead of observation. I know this because a long time ago I did exactly that. What did the Arizona desert teach me about painting light and color? More things than I can list, but below are the main points.

View across the Verde Valley, 11X14, oil on birch panel. Available through Sedona Arts Center.

Capturing desert light 

Capturing desert light starts with understanding that Arizona’s atmosphere is clean, dry, and thin. There’s very little haze to soften transitions. As a result, value contrasts are stronger than you may be used to, and color temperature shifts are abrupt. Sunlit planes are warmer than expected, except at midday. The shadows snap cool, sometimes dramatically so. That’s from a distance. Up close, there’s a tremendous amount of color bouncing around the shadows. They are often higher in chroma than the sun-bleached parts of the picture.

If your painting feels flat, it’s often because you aren’t respecting color temperature enough.

Carol L. Douglas painting at Acadia National Park
Sunlight and shadows, oil on birch, 14X18, private collection.

Painting rock formations 

Painting rocks is less about detail and more about structure. From individual rocks to gigantic massifs, rock formations are built from planes. Start by identifying the major directional faces of the rock and assign them clear value families. Vertical planes can read darker than sloped ones, and ledges catch light differently still. At the vast scale of the desert, texture and detail are almost an afterthought. If you paint every crack and striation, you’ll destroy your painting—and your mind.

Lone pines, 14X18, oil on birch, available through Sedona Arts Center.

Working fast in changing light 

Working fast is not optional in the desert. The light moves quickly, and shadows can crawl across a canyon wall in minutes. This is where the preparatory sketch earns its keep. Adapt it for desert conditions by simplifying even more than usual. Four different value steps are sufficient. If you can’t organize the scene in ten minutes, you won’t fix it in two hours. And you’ll be mighty glad to have that sketch when the light shifts.

Color mixing for arid landscapes 

Color mixing for arid landscapes is where many painters go off the rails. Yes, rocks are orange and bluffs are ochre. But Sedona and the wider Southwest are full of violets, cool reds, muted greens and dusty neutrals. Shadows are often infused with unexpected color. Adjust temperature rather than dialing up saturation. If everything is intense, nothing is.

The desert doesn’t reward fussing. It rewards decisiveness, clear value structure, and honest color. Arizona’s landscape will teach you quickly where your habits help you—and where they don’t. That’s why painters keep coming back. The desert is a tough teacher, but it never wastes your time.

Want to learn more?

This March, I’m leading a 5-day plein air workshop in Arizona, and I’d love for you to join me.

Canyon Color for the Painter: A Plein Air Workshop will be held through the Sedona Arts Center, March 9–13, 2026. This immersive week-long workshop is designed for painters in oil, acrylic, pastel, watercolor, gouache, and all experience levels.

You can register directly on Sedona Arts Center’s website, here. Or, contact me if you have questions. I’m happy to answer anything about the workshop, skill requirements, materials or what to expect painting in the desert.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: you asked ChatGPT what?

My students love to send me things they know will interest me, but sometimes they send me things to make my hair stand on end. As a courtesy, I’ve obliterated the OP’s name and photograph, but you really asked ChatGPT to tell you what paints to buy? And you put 32 paints on your palette? And now you want to know about color theory?

Assuming OP bought regular-size tubes of paints, they set her back $15-20 each. For 32 paints, that’s between $480 and $640. All those paints won’t make her a better painter. They’ll make her a worse painter, because she’ll never learn about color theory and color mixing.

A few years ago, I mailed a small sample of paints to a student in South Carolina. She was frustrated with her paints and I was equally frustrated watching her try and fail to hit color notes. What I sent her was a simple, primary-color limited palette: QoR brand Ultramarine Blue, Nickel Azo Yellow, and Quinacridone Magenta. This is what she did with them:

A color chart done with just three pigments: ultramarine blue, nickel-azo yellow, and quinacridone magenta.

Learn to love limited palette

A limited palette sounds like a restriction, but it’s a shortcut to clarity and cohesiveness. Instead of dabbing in all those paint pots, you learn to mix and marry color.

Learning to mix color teaches you more about color theory than any color wheel. You discover how complements neutralize each other, how color temperature works to create form, and how value does the heavy lifting in painting.

Color harmony and consistency

When all your colors are mixed from the same small family, they are innately related—that’s a shortcut to color harmony. There are no out-of-tune notes screaming for attention. For beginners, who often struggle with garish or muddy color, limited palette creates a more consistent color voice.

Painters need to learn the working characteristics of their paints, including hue, value, chroma, transparency, granulation (in watercolor) and dry time (in oils). That’s hard enough to master for just a few paints.

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor on Yupo, ~24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Decisiveness

With fewer choices, you spend less time dithering and more time painting. That’s invaluable in alla prima and plein air, but it matters any time you pick up a brush. You’re not hunting for the perfect color on your oversized palette; you’re learning to make what you need. This builds confidence and speed.

We can play fast and loose with hue if value is right, which is why pink or yellow skies can make perfect sense in paintings. When pigment options are reduced, we’re forced to shift our attention to value, which is more important than hue.

By stripping color back to basics, we also see form, edges and composition more clearly.

Autumn Farm, Evening Blues, oil on canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

A limited palette is a tool, not a moral position

Once you understand what each pigment on your palette does, you can expand with intention. But I’ll note that I’m using the same number of paints I was thirty years ago, with very few modifications. They’re simply not necessary.

In the end, a limited palette isn’t about limitation at all. It’s about focus. By reducing choices, you sharpen your eye, strengthen your technique, and let painting be about seeing rather than collecting colors. That’s a lesson worth revisiting at every stage of an artist’s journey.

And, by the way, I’d have freely shared my palette recommendations with this artist. She’d have had hundred of bucks to spend more intelligently… and most of her paint wells would have remained empty.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: clueless about brushes

Heavy Weather (Ketch Angelique), 24X36, oil on canvas, framed, $3985 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“I’m clueless about what different brushes do,” a student emailed. She’s not alone. Walk into any art supply store and you’re confronted by a bewildering wall of fine-art painting brushes. They differ in hair, length, spring and, most visibly, in shape. And still, with all that variety, I can manage to not find the brushes I’m looking for. Each brush speaks differently, and painters develop strong preferences that can, however, change over time as our styles evolve. Knowing what brush to grab is part of learning how to paint.

I’ve written in detail about what brushes do, here and here. But let’s talk more generally about brushes.

Clary Hill Blueberry Barrens, watercolor on Yupo, ~24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Brush history

Brush evolution began in antiquity; as paint varied in viscosity, it required different brushes. Western painting started off with fairly simple round brushes. Meanwhile, Chinese calligraphy had very different requirements: a pointed round end with a full belly that could make either precise or broad strokes. We look for similar brushes in watercolor painting today.

By the Middle Ages, manuscript illumination called for fine squirrel and sable hair brushes. But brushes were still less important than today. There is a famous legend about Giovanni Bellini‘s admiration for Albrecht Dürer‘s incredible technique in painting hair. Bellini asked Dürer for the brushes he used. Dürer showed him his ordinary collection of brushes and demonstrated his technique by painting a long, flowing strand of hair with remarkable precision.

Brushes weren’t standardized until the 19th century, when their manufacture was industrialized. This coincided with Impressionism, when visible brushwork became not a flaw but a feature. Stiffer bristles and brighter shapes supported looser, faster painting.

Main Street, Owl’s Head, oil on archival canvasboard, $1623 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What do different brush shapes do?

Round brushes taper to a point, which means they can draw a line, place a dot, or broaden into a stroke with pressure. In watercolor painting, a good round brush can carry a surprising amount of pigment and still snap to a sharp point for detail. In oil painting and acrylic painting, rounds are excellent for drawing into wet paint, placing accents, and working smaller passages.

Flat brushes have a squared-off edge and long hairs that hold paint evenly. They excel at laying down broad, confident strokes. Flats are perfect for blocking in large shapes, cutting clean edges, and establishing planes. Turn one on its side and you get a thin line; press it flat and you cover ground quickly.

Brights are just short flats. The reduced hair length makes them stiffer and more controllable. That stiffness is ideal for pushing thicker paint in oil painting or for scrubbing color into the surface in acrylic painting. If you like visible brushwork and a sense of physical paint, brights give you that muscular quality.

Filberts combine the coverage of a flat with the gentleness of a round. They naturally create organic edges, perfect for modeling form. They’re especially useful when you want transitions without fussing.

Angle brushes have a slanted edge that makes them excellent for controlled strokes and awkward angles.

Quebec Brook, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Fan brushes are not for painting happy little trees. Fan brushes can soften edges, blend transitions, or suggest texture like grasses, hair, or water reflections. The key is restraint.

Mop brushes are for watercolor painting. Their full, rounded shape holds a great deal of water, making them ideal for washes, soft skies, and seamless transitions.

Ultimately, brush shapes don’t make a painting good or bad. They shape how you think and how your hand moves. Experimenting with different fine-art painting brushes teaches you to see stroke, edge, and texture as choices rather than accidents. And that—more than owning the ‘right’ brush—is where real progress begins.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: the danger of safe color

Towpath on the Erie Canal
“Pulteney vineyard,” private collection. For another treatment of the same vineyard, see here.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a delicate painting, but safe color can make an otherwise accomplished painting boring. That’s true even when the drawing is solid, the values are controlled and the technique is assured. There are certainly days when the light is dull and the color is duller. But you need to translate that into something that will compel the viewer to walk across the room.

The modern world loves color saturation. My phone edits my photos to be hyperintense; social media is full of high-chroma color. In this world, paintings that whisper can disappear entirely.

High chroma, however, must be balanced with lower-chroma passages. Otherwise, it overwhelms. The goal isn’t maximum saturation everywhere; it’s contrast of saturation.

Towpath on the Erie Canal
“Towpath on the Erie Canal,” 30X40, oil on canvas, private collection.

How to mix mud… or not

Clean color mixing starts with understanding warmth and coolness within individual pigments. Overtones matter. You can’t randomly mix any blue and any red and expect a high-octane purple. If either pigment carries yellow overtones, you’ll get mud. It’s easy to subdue a wild color; it’s impossible to enliven a dead one. Paint can never be mixed more intensely than it comes out of the tube.

The three historical palettes (and that’s a vast oversimplification) are classical, impressionist, and 20th-century. The 20th century palette has the highest chroma, widest temperature spread and hits the most points on the color wheel. Starting there saves you aggravation, because buying more paint than you need is a waste of money and a fast track to confusion.

Paired primaries can get you to anywhere you need to go in paint-mixing. For more information, see here.

Some specific color concerns

I recommend against heavy-metal pigments for environmental and safety reasons. They also tend to make muddy colors. For example, cadmium pigments mix true only to the warm side.

Viridian is a very cool green and almost always needs warming for foliage. If you mix lemon yellows with any blues, you’ll get cool spring greens. Most natural greens are warmer. Yellow ochre and Indian yellow temper greens because you’re actually adding a lot of red.

For the same reason, darkening with red kills chroma. Instead, use quinacridone magenta or violet.

It’s easy to drop the chroma of high-chroma 20th century pigments.

How to hit the perfect color every time

Start with the pigment closest to your goal. Ask: in which direction on the color wheel do I need to go? Does chroma need lowering? Does it need to go darker? Lighter? Once you’ve answered those questions, you can stop fiddling.

And remember, you can lie about hue if you tell the truth about value.

If you mix the color right but you still make mud, the culprits may be:

  • Too much solvent or medium;
  • Too many layers;
  • Overworking and fussing;
  • Digging in with a vertical brush.

As the old Ronco ads used to say, “set it and forget it.”

By the way, one reason we tend to use too much solvent or medium is that we’ve let our paint half harden on the palette and are trying to open it back up. Suck it up and put out fresh paint.

Want to try painting? I’d love to have you join me for Trust the Process (making technique tell the story you want to tell), my live Zoom class designed to help you build a dependable, joyful, repeatable painting practice. We’ll dig into technique, creative decision-making and the mindset that frees you to paint with confidence. We meet Monday nights, 6-9 PM EST, starting on January 5, 2026. It’s suitable for all levels and all media. You can learn more here.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School: design elements

Santa Claus, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Design elements are in themselves neither good nor bad. They are ideals that can be used in many ways. That’s why two paintings with identical subject matter can land so differently.

You can understand the principles of design intuitively, without being able to name design elements, but it helps to have a common language.

The basic design elements

  • Line—that’s either a long mark or boundary between two shapes; 
  • Shape—an area defined by boundaries;
  • Form—that has different meaning in 2D and 3D design. In painting it means how we represent three-dimensional space;
  • Color, which is made up of:
    • Hue—the position on the color wheel,
    • Chroma—how intense the color is, and,
    • Value—the lightness or darkness of a color, creating contrast and dimension; 
  • Texture—the surface quality of the work, which in practice means brushwork;
  • Rhythm and movement—the organized repetition of objects, and the path through the painting;
  • Balance—how far the painting moves off from symmetry;
  • Focal points—the areas that draw the viewer’s eye first.
Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

No artist can focus on all these at one time. Composition depends on which design elements we choose to stress and how they relate to each other. For example, almost all paintings have line in some form. But is that line restrained? Kinetic? Is it meant to support focal points or recede into the background?

A masterpiece may have quiet, smooth brushwork or bravura brushwork. Neither is ‘better,’ no matter how many times you’ve been told to loosen up. Bravura brushwork may be associated with the brilliant palettes of modern painters, but there were many Old Masters, including Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals and Rembrandt, who painted loosely. Conversely, there are contemporary painters using polished surfaces. What matters is how design elements fit together.

Subject matter has little to do with design.

I have taken tens of thousands of photos I’ll never paint. A strong photo is not necessarily a strong painting. The camera records everything with glacial indifference; we, the artists, must emphasize what’s important.

I find nature a very compelling subject, but nature itself doesn’t guarantee a strong painting. Paintings fail when the value structure is vague, focal points are accidental or don’t exist at all, and nothing is dominant.

Example of nōtan from Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color (1899) by Arthur Wesley Dow.

This has been a guiding principle of painting in all times and places. Compare Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, Jusepe de Ribera’s The Martyrdom of St. Andrew, Winslow Homer’s Weatherbeaten,  Wayne Thiebaud’s Around the Cake and Hasegawa Tōhaku’s The Pine Trees. They’re from different times and places and about radically different subjects. However, they all pare representation down to its essentials. Design is not a modern invention.

Arthur Wesley Dow was one of the great American painting teachers. He pioneered the ideas of space-cutting and nōtan. Both ideas emphasized the arrangement of beautiful shapes, and they’re skills worth practicing.

Example of space cutting from Composition: Understanding Line, Notan and Color (1899) by Arthur Wesley Dow.

Want to learn more about this? I’d love to have you join me for Trust the Process (making technique tell the story you want to tell), my live Zoom class designed to help you build a dependable, joyful, repeatable painting practice. We’ll dig into technique, creative decision-making and the mindset that frees you to paint with confidence. We meet Monday nights, 6-9 PM EST, starting on January 5, 2026. It’s suitable for all levels and all media. You can learn more here.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters

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Monday Morning Art School—trust the process

Rachel’s Garden, ~24×35, watercolor on Yupo, museum-grade plexiglass, $3985 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I’m busy writing my upcoming Zoom class, Trust the Process (making technique tell the story you want to tell). That could easily be one of those glib phrases that’s so repeatable that it starts to lose its meaning. However, I think creative success depends on it.

Many painters define their artistic identity based on their successes or failures. But when our sense of worth gets tied to outcome, our confidence flickers: one day we’re geniuses, the next we’re frauds. That’s no way to sustain a joyful or productive painting practice.

Midsummer, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3,188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

That’s the trap of outcome-based thinking. It’s familiar to almost everyone who’s ever picked up a brush. When we chase external validation—awards, sales, praise and, especially, social-media likes—we create a cycle of euphoria followed by despair. The highs are fleeting; the lows are dismal and feel interminable.

That whole rollercoaster puts our sense of artistic self-worth in the hands of someone or something else. No wonder so many artists live in states of constant insecurity. When others control the verdict, we never feel settled in our own skin.

How process helps

But process-based painting restores our sanity. Art isn’t the sum of our accolades; it’s our creative thinking made visible. What happens on the canvas is a reflection of curiosity, observation, and problem-solving, not a performance. When we remember that the painting process matters as much as the final outcome, the ground under our feet steadies. The joy of painting comes from the physical act of making marks, mixing color, exploring edges and taking risks, not from waiting breathlessly to see whether someone else approves.

Bunker Hill overlook, watercolor on Yupo, approx. 24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Creativity requires relaxation. Exploration and play happen only when ego steps aside and you drop into the moment. If you’re tense, self-critical or worrying whether your painting will be good enough, you’ve already shut down the important part of your mind. The more you separate your ego from the results, the more freely you’ll work, and the better your painting will be. The joy, and the results, are all in the making.

A few decades ago, I had a student who started every class by announcing: “This painting is for my mother’s birthday,” or “This is going to be a housewarming gift.” I couldn’t talk her out of that, but it was consistently paralyzing. She worried about what the recipient would think and whether it would be good enough for the recipient. Sadly, her work never measured up to the expectations she set before she even picked up a brush. In trying so hard to make great paintings, she froze. She squeezed the growth out of them. Along with that went all her enjoyment, experimentation and play. There was no vitality and no joy. Not surprisingly, she eventually quit painting.

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, oil on canvas, 24X36, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What does Trust the Process really mean?

Trust the Process means having a reliable, repeatable way of working that will carry you through the rough patches. When technique becomes second nature, you can stop thinking about it and start thinking creatively. That requires painting enough for mastery, but it also helps to understand how painting technique has developed over the last six hundred years. There really are right and wrong ways to do it.

When the mechanics fade into the background, you paint in the moment. And from that place, both skill and satisfaction grow naturally. The process is where art actually lives.

If this idea resonates, then I’d love to have you join me for Trust the Process (making technique tell the story you want to tell), my live Zoom class designed to help you build a dependable, joyful, repeatable painting practice. We’ll dig into technique, creative decision-making and the mindset that frees you to paint with confidence. We meet Monday nights, 6-9 PM EST, starting on January 5, 2026. It’s suitable for all levels and all media. You can learn more here.

Registration is now open for workshops in 2026! Reserve your spot:

Can’t commit to a full workshop? Work online at your own pace:

Seven Protocols for Successful Oil Painters