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Richard is a talented full time artist, who loves painting and teaching.
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with Richard Robinson
Paradise is one of my favorite painting spots anywhere on the planet. Join me as I take you through this beautiful painting step by step. You’ll learn how to paint receding mountains, snow in shade and light, wispy autumnal willow trees and how to add those finishing details. Enjoy!
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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.
"Paradise" 13x10.5" Oil on Canvas by Richard Robinson.
"Workshop33" Oil on Canvas, 12"x16" by Janet Buckton
Good drawing skills shown here Janet - you've been pretty acurate with your shapes while showing a fair amount of expressive brushwork - never an easy combo to get right but you've done it well. You're colours are mostly working well together, especially the atmospheric recession in the mountains. You've made a fairly tidy hedgerow of the foreground trees with simliar sizes and colours and missed an opportunity for variation. As a general 'rule' I tend to try to avoid repeating shapes and sizes anywhere in a painting - it's like a monotonous drum beat compared to a lyrical melody. There's a little confusion as to how the ground is lying the front left coming up to the big trees. I think it's the sheep doing the damage there actually because you've painted little shadows under them, as if viewed from a height whereas the shape of the hill is trying to tell us something different. Have another look at the sheep in my painting. Overall though, a very good job.
"Autumn Paradise" 40x40cm Oil on Canvas by Elena Sokolova
You've got great colour in this painting Elena. By raising the saturation of the warms in the foreground you've made a much stronger colour statement than I did in my demo painting. The cools in the mountains look all the more cool by comparison. If you had lightened the darks in the mountains by just one step you could have created a little more distance between it and the foreground, but the main thing that's causing your mountains to pop forward is the brushwork back there which you've unfortunately made a pattern of - like fence palings - without enough variation in them to simulate reality. Give it a few more goes and you'll get the hang of it - it's not easy at first.
"Paradise Estuary" oil on canvas 45 x 35cm by Suzanne Louise Andrew
This is certainly a different take on the scene Suzanne - much more sombre. Great to see you playing with it like that. The mountains are receeding nicely and with subtle value steps and you've achieved that spotlit effect there too - nice job. You've made a pattern of the mountain shapes - they're starting to look mass produced rather than individual sculptures. It's all too easy to do this painting mountains and it really begins at the sketching in stage where you need to focus hard on the angles of each mountain so that they don't copy each other. Nice too see you've had fun with the palette knife in the river. I feel as though the river gets a little bitsy or fragmented there in places. I be looking to simplify some of that so it reads a little easier. Even cropping some off the bottom might do. You've made the strip of land closest to us on the left too similar in size, shape and colour to the land directly behind it for my eye and their edges are resting on each other rather than being separate or clearly overlapping. It might look better trimming the left side of it off and making an island of it. I hope those few pointers help out.
"Ian's Interpretation of Paradise" 15"x10" Water Soluble Oil on Canvas by Ian Given
Hi Ian, not too shabby brother - lots of things going right, a few things to look at again. Overall it's a very pleasing image - the values and colours are working well together and your drawing and brushwork is sound. I'd take another look at the similarity of values between the darks in the background and foreground. Making the mountains slightly lighter will give you more depth and variation. To achieve that it often pays to place your darkest dark in the foreground right at the beginning to give yourself a value baseline to measure off. You could add more variation into the yellow ochre grasses in the foreground because without that they're looking a little flat. The greens on the mountains in the mountains seem to be a little too dark and too vibrant - if they were a little lighter and grayer they would sit there better. Cameras often lighten the blues in our paintings though. (The camera does lie.)
"Workshop33" Oil on gessoed cardboard 12" x 10" by Olivia O'Carra
My immediate thought here Olivia is that the gessoed cardboard you used to paint on was too absorbent because the paintwork looks very dry and scratchy. I had a similar effect recently when painting a still life of my cello on plain paper - an awful experience that made me better appreciate the slickness of a properly primed surface and just how nice it is to have the paint flow smoothly off the brush rather than being immediately absorbed into the surface. Apart from that and the detriment it's had on your brushwork I would commend you on your colour which is working pretty well but I'd caution you on your drawing of the base of the mountains which has gone awry. The bases should be pretty straight and level, but stepping back behind each other. You got the stepping back, but not so much with the straight and level. Overall it looks great from a distance - shame about that cardboard though - go spoil yourself and buy some good canvas!
2026 08 20 - Paradise
Artist: Tom Gysel
Paradise Valley 10 x 12 inch. Acrylic
Artist: Robert Mitchener
Painting paradise #33
Hey Mark, great painting. Solid drawing, interesting brushwork and strong colour. I'd just suggest that you lighten and blue the colours more into the distant mountains, adding more depth. Also you could do with practicing the shapes of the snow in shadow and light. As can I. Have a good look at how John Crump does that. Copy a few of them and then do the same with a few photos. It's trickier than it looks of course to translate all the intricacies of a snow clad mountain into a simplified version on canvas. By focusing on those for a while you'll get the hang of it and figure out your own visual shorthand for it.
Second go, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. At least I hope I succeeded this tine🤔
Hi Nancy, good effort on this painting. Lots of work gone in I can see. Overall the colour works well, and there are sections of nice painterly brushwork and the drawing is not half bad. Beware leaving those dark contrasty lines in the mountains that attract the eye. Ask yourself why would they be darker than any other shadow on that mountain. They wouldn't. Also ask yourself why would shadows in the distant mountains be darker than shadows in the foreground hills. Again, they wouldn't. Those in the foreground need to be darkened. Similarly, the shadow sides of the sheep need to be darker for a better sense of light and form. Look also at your tree which seems too symmetrical and pruned for a natural specimen. Making it less regular gives it more character and interest. Happy painting!
Paradise, Isabel Gibson, acrylic
Nice work Isabel. The drawing is good, the overall colour scheme is nice and warm due to your shadowed snow being more neutral grey than blue grey and your brushwork is bold and painterly. Good to see. 3 things I'd like to tweak: Make less contrast and more blue in the colours in the mountains receding into the distance. If you squint at mine you can see those colours blend together into a blue grey because they're all very close to each other in hue and value. Squint at yours and you can still see those dark greens popping out. They're too dark and not blue-grey enough. Easy to fix. Secondly, while you're there, be mindful to avoid leaving little lines along the edges of the mountains that give them a slight outlined look. Outlining objects is the quickest way to flatten a scene, and we don't want that in this painting that's all about creating depth. Lastly, a small thing too, the edges of the shadows in the long grass cast by the tallest tree need to be more soft edged and grassy. And if you vary the long dark shape on the top edge of that hill more it'll look less like an outline as well. Hope that helps.
Paradise: Oil on canvas 11x14
Great bold painterly work, Nancy. There's a lot of contrast in value and warms/cools in there that's quite striking. I do like how your left most mountains are so big they're cropped at the top, but I'd like to see those pushed clean out the top rather than trying to squeeze them in there. The cropping gives a great sense of scale, like they are so big they can't even fit. Nice.
Paradise in Oils V:2
Geoffrey this is all good. I'd only change one thing and that's the brushwork of the sunlit snow on the mountains. It just seems disproportionately thicker and textured than the rest of the painting. It's great to try these things, and if you like that I'd encourage you to continue, but for me the texture is too different from the rest of the painting which is all brushed on rather than dabbed on. There's my two cents. Otherwise, love it!
PARADISE by KEWoodman
Lovely work, Kimberly. Great colour and brushwork and drawing. I'd just like to see a little more care with some of the edges to sharpen them up and provide a little more clarity. I', specifically looking at the left hand edge of the mountain on the left that could be brought forward by sharpening and thereby giving the valley beyond it more depth.
Autumn in Paradise
Artist: Dorian LeMieux
Weekly class recommendations- Paradise 8”x10”Acrylic on canvas by Karen Woodhouse (South Australia)
Artist: Karen Woodhouse
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