Teacher
Richard is a talented full time artist, who loves painting and teaching.
A friendly place to learn at your own pace.
with Richard Robinson
Follow me one brushstroke at a time as I take you through the process of creating an acrylic painting which has all the hallmarks of an oil painting. Learn to create large gradations, soft edged brushwork and sparkling impasto highlights.
Good design, accurate drawing, passionate brushwork and a variety of fun techniques are all demonstrated in the video. Enjoy!
Oils are fine for this lesson too.
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.
Water Lilies
14x16" Acrylic on Canvas
Water lilies, acrylic with oil glazing, canvas, 40 cm x 50 cm
Hi Elena, what a serene, luminous piece—you’ve really captured that cool, tranquil pond light, and the soft glazes give the water a lovely sense of depth and movement. I especially enjoy the lost-and-found edges on the lily pads and the delicate pinks sitting against those deep blues! I'd like to see you use a finer rigger or long dagger brush for those thin details in the stalks, the key skill there to to get the paint just thin enough (and to load the brush smoothly) so that it can glide off the brush in a single crisp stroke. Beautiful work - keep exploring those subtle temperature shifts and edge variety!
"Water Lilies" Watercolour & Gouache by Eric Hillmer, Toronto, ON, Canada
Hi Eric, this has a lovely, tranquil mood and a strong sense of light—those warm reds popping against the cool violets and blues are doing great focal-point work! To push this further, try broadening the value structure: deepen a few of the darkest darks in the water (particularly around the outside of the scene) to increase depth and make the lit pads feel brighter. Consider softening more of the pad edges in the distance and reserving your crispest, hardest edges for the main red bloom and its nearest pads—right now many edges compete equally. You could also glaze a subtle, cooler note into the background pads to help them recede, and introduce a touch of reflected red into adjacent pads to harmonize the focal colour. Your most distant pads need flattening out to help create more depth. Lovely work—just a bit more edge control and value contrast will make this sing!
Water Lilies oil on canvas 12x14
Lovely mood here, Nancy—the cool, velvety blues and that luminous vertical reflection create a serene pathway of light, and your soft edges in the water feel spot on. Your lilypad ellipses are well drawn for their positions, and you have a good amount of variety, thoughtfully done. Very succinct brushwork without over-working it - nice. Beautiful work - keep leaning into that poetic light!
Monet's lily pond
Hi Ian, lovely job capturing the serenity of the pond - the soft willows, the dappled reflections, and those delicate pinks on the lilies all sing, and Monet's turquoise bridge makes a strong, cheerful focal point. I think Monet would approve! To deepen the space, consider pushing the shadows under the background trees a touch cooler in contrast to the warmth in the foreground water. Your lilypad ellipses are working well, but I'd like to see those further back flattening out a little more. The effects of distance on shapes and colours in a landscape get exponentially more pronounced the closer it is to the horizon - it's not a linear progression. Said another way, there's more distance contained within one inch down from the horizon than there is from the bottom of that inch to your feet. It helps me to remember that when painting landscapes. Beautiful work - I can feel the sunlight!
Water Lilies by Louise Villegas - 16 x 20 Oil. I used PaintyBot for some help!
Hi Louise, lovely work—those pink blooms sitting on that cool, luminous water are instantly engaging, and I like the soft gradation from dark to light up the canvas. The warm-cool play between the lilypads (cool greens in shadow, warmer yellow-greens catching light) feels convincing, and your edge variety on those is spot on - softer in the distance. I recommend you trying to paint with fewer brushstrokes to avoid the paint surface looking over worked and softened. Then you can add some much thicker paint in the foreground to add more interest and also help create depth by contrasting with the smoother paint in the back of the scene. Beautiful, serene piece—well done!
Not loving your painting lessons? No worries!
If it’s not the right fit, we’ll give you a full refund within 30 days of purchase - no questions asked.
When you purchase a DVD you also get online access to the same lesson, including any lesson resources like photos, downloadable notes and access to upload your painting to the student gallery.
That's why you need to make a password when you purchase a DVD, so you can access the online content as well. Enjoy!