A friendly place to learn at your own pace.
with Richard Robinson
Paint this classic boat scene with broad gestural brushwork. Learn how to match colour easily and how to paint with masses (not messes!) and finish with calligraphic details. Enjoy!
Whenever you’re ready! The lesson is available online any time, and your access to the lesson never expires.
As long as you need! Your access never expires, so you can come back again and again.
Sorry, no you can’t download the video. This is to avoid piracy. You’ll always be able to view the video on this site though.
Richard is a talented full time artist, who loves painting and teaching.
Hi I’m Richard. I’ve been painting my whole life and back in 2001 I traded my graphic design career for the humble life of a full time artist. I love painting, and as it turns out, I love teaching too.
Nowadays I balance my life between parenting, painting, surfing, travelling and teaching. My work is regularly featured in international art magazines, in galleries in New Zealand and America, on TV and in my Mum’s house.
I give outdoor painting workshops in interesting spots around this beautiful planet of ours and love encouraging people to paint. Two of my favourite artists are John Singer Sargent and Joaquín Sorolla.
My painting website: www.nzpainter.com
I’d love to be your new teacher.
Richard is a master artist with an exceptional skill in identifying and communicating key factors to making successful paintings. I have found his video workshops an excellent resource for improving my own work.
"Sunday Repairs" 14 x 16" Oil on Canvas by Richard Robinson.
This scene was a joy to paint. It took 90 minutes to paint, but only the last 15 minutes were spent on detail. The majority of the work lay in building the big beautiful shapes containing subtle colour shifts. The few details are the small stitches that hold the whole garment together and give it realism. The most difficult colour to analyse was the shadowed white sides of the boats. In the video I show you exactly how to see, analyse and mix these subtle greys.
'On the Hard' 8x100" Oil on Canvas by Laurena Beirnes
Love the bold design here Laurena. Good drawing. Great sense of the power, colour and direction of the light. Note that you've mixed your shadows a bit though - a strong light like this would give the boats sharper edged cast shadows on the ground. I'd like to see you try using much thicker paint in the lights - this will help create a more painterly look.
'Dry Dock' 30x40cm Oil on Canvas by Gunther Andree
Beautiful detailed work here Gunther, especially in the modelling of the form of the hull with light and shadow. Love the sky glinting of the window too. Nice! The drawing of the boat is excellent, but not so for a few other details - the placement of the bases of the stabilisers on the ground, the spacing of the rungs on the ladder and the left most boat. They're letting the team down, but the team is great. Last thing, the cast shadow on the ground is looking a bit flat and stand-up-ish. To connect this better to the light on the ground you can run a couple of subtle darkish lines from the foreground light, through the shadows and into the background light. The lines should diminish in size darken with the shadow. When you do this with shadow areas it makes them irrefutably connected to the lights. Here's an example:
'Dry Dock' 30x40cm Oil on Canvas by Gunther Andree - Altered
Foreground directional lines added to make the shadow areas lie flatter and to help direct the eye.
'Drydock' 8x10" Oil on Panel by Jim Baldoumas
Great energy in this Jim, beautiful colours versus subtle greys. Your drawing like many of the paintings submitted needs some tweaking and for that I suggest viewing this reversed in a mirror. As SOON as you do that you'll be able to see the problems in the drawing. Works every time.
'Boat Repair' 16x20" Oil on Canvas by Jim Delk
Great work Jim - LOVE the brushwork and colour in this. Again, check the drawing in the mirror. You've inadvertently made a bit of an Escher illusion by moving the base of the ladder. There's something odd happening in the tree with the blue-grey painted over top of them - needs reworking. Shadow on building is too blue. Overall it's great - just a few things to look at.
'Getting Summer Ready' 9x12" Oil on Linen Panel by Chris Bloom
Great energy in the brushwork here Chris and you've got the shadow and light colours in the hull just right. The only small thing spoiling this painting for me at the moment is the too-thick painting of the rigging which seems to be fairly common among the other paintings. If you remember in the video I demonstrated first how not to do it (not intentionally!) and then scraped it off and repainted the rigging using a mahlstick to rest my hand on and painting each line in one swift stroke with a rigger brush (also called a liner brush). The thickness of the paint on your brush is all-important when you do this so it pays to practice on your palette with different viscosities of paint before you attempt those few crucial lines on your painting. Other than that, great work!
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