2025
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Online Recordings: “Technique Takeaway” Mini-Workshops
Winslow Art Center offers weekly online mini-workshops called “Technique Takeaways.” I’ve given five of these. $40 gives you access for two months. See all Technique Takeaways.
Landscape Essentials: The Language of Shape and The Art of Simplification
ONLINE: Winter 2025 | Mastrius.com
Smart Starts: Underpainting with Composition, Value, and Color
IN PERSON: March 8–9, 2025 | Picket Fence Art Studio | $395
Beyond the Color Wheel: Navigating the “Complete” Color Strategy
IN PERSON: late summer 2025 | Dakota Art | $395
You are the best workshop instructor I have ever had. Terrific handouts, example boards, demos, exercises. You are a gifted and generous teacher and I hope to attend a class with you again. – Lisa Richter
Landscape Essentials: The Language of Shape and The Art of Simplification
ONLINE: 5 week class, meets every other Friday morning 10 am – 12:15, Jan 17, 31, Feb 14, 28, with a half session on March 14 | Registration at Mastrius.com
for painters in all media
“It’s easy to paint a thousand points of light with a thousand brushstrokes. It’s much more difficult — but infinitely more eloquent — to paint a thousand points of light with only one hundred strokes.” – Mitchell Albala, from Landscape Painting: Essential Concepts and Techniques for Plein Air and Studio Practice
The ability to simplify — to translate nature’s complexity into fewer and more readable shapes and patterns — is the most important skill for the landscape painter. Painting or drawing a shape is not that difficult, but seeing that shape through layers of color, detail and complexity requires a practiced shift in perception. In this class, you will discover how shape is the animating spirit of a painting. Working from your own photos and/or those supplied by the instructor, you will do several exercises and paintings, designed to encourage your eye and hand toward the simplified shape interpretation that is the backbone of the landscape painting experience. This workshop will cover:
• how the first step of simplification is through a “limited focus”
• how limited values encourage shape differentiation
• shape combining and how to discriminate between primary shapes and minor shapes
• how to build a foundation with a limited number of shapes
• how detail and simplicity play together with the 80/20 rule
Level: This workshop is not suitable for first-time painters (those who have never painted or mixed color at all), but is ideally suited for those new to landscape and plein air painting, or more advanced painters who want and to better understand this foundational practice.
“Mitchell is a fantastic instructor. His demos and assignments are well thought out and challenging, carefully crafted so that students truly understand what he wants to convey, both by observing and practicing.” – participant, The Contemporary Impressionist Landscape, 2024
Smart Starts: Underpainting with Composition, Value, and Color
IN PERSON: 2-day workshop, March 8–9, 2025 | 9 am – 4:30 pm (1.5 hr lunch) | Picket Fence Art Studio | $395 | Registration
We have lots of concerns about how to finish a painting, but a successful finish depends in large part on the decisions we make at the start. This workshop will help you build a practice of “smart starts.” We not only cover the technical side of underpainting, but also the theory — how it can lay a solid foundation of composition, value, and even color direction. By properly working out these issues at the start, you can avoid costly mistakes and the need to rework the painting later on. A well thought out underpainting can take you 50% of the way to the finish line. The workshop begins with the first act of composition: applying a limited focus. By considering shape size and the arrangement of light and dark masses, you’ll be able to find the strongest possible composition.
On Day 1, you’ll start two paintings, each with a different underpainting approach. The monochromatic, 1-color underpainting serves as a primer on value relationships and simplification. Learn how the single color chosen for the underpainting supports the painting’s color direction. The color underpainting is the more advanced form of underpainting and applies different colors to the major shapes. How those color masses relate is the foundation of the color strategy.
On Day 2, you’ll work toward a finish on your two underpaintings, and see how additional layers of color interact with the underpainting.
Media: Open to oil and pastel painters.
Level: Intermediate to advanced. This workshop is not suitable for first-time painters (those who have never painted or mixed color at all), but is ideally suited those new to landscape or plein air painting, and want to better understand this essential foundation practice.
Mitchell is a patient instructor whose dedication is apparent. He is very clear with critique … and does not lose sight of the magical quality that painting has and balances this well with technical knowledge to create an enjoyable and worthwhile experience. – participant, The Contemporary Impressionist Landscape, 2024
Beyond the Color Wheel: Navigating the “Complete” Color Strategy
IN PERSON: 3-day workshop, late summer, 2025 | 9 am – 4:30 daily (1.5 hr lunch) | Dakota Art
For landscape painters in all media: oil, pastel, watercolor, gouache, or acrylic. (The instructor will demonstrate in oil and pastel.)
The most effective color solutions in landscape painting do far more than reproduce the colors found in the natural world or in our photos. To capture the qualities of color and light, painters also rely on a color strategy. We typically think of the strategy as only being about the relationships found on the color wheel, such as analogous, complementary, triadic, etc. In fact, a “complete” color strategy involves two other essential aspects of color — relative value contrasts and relative saturation levels. Working from photographs, and through a series of practical exercises, ongoing critiques, and analysis of contemporary colorists, you will learn how all three aspects of the color strategy work synergistically to create mood, atmospheric effects, and a particular color of light. Topics to be covered include:
- the power of limited color groups and color dominance
- color temperature
- the innate harmony of the neutral palette
- the proper way to work with high saturation palettes
- how value affects the perception of color
- the proper way to reference color in your photos
Level: Advanced beginner to advanced