Painting Landscapes, Understanding Color in Nature

Join Mike Wise for three days of instruction in his beautiful home studio on Whidbey Island, minutes from the charming town of Coupeville. Mike is known for his gorgeous paintings of lily ponds, rural American farms, lush rivers, and aspen groves. In this workshop, students will learn the methods and techniques for creating stunning three-dimensional oil paintings using texture and dynamic mark-making.Fans of this artist love his style: bold brushwork and thickly applied paint which creates rich texture and renders his subjects so beautifully. In this class, you will learn how to use mediums and tools for dimensional oil painting. You’ll execute a landscape painting from start to finish, learning tips and tricks along the way. Throughout this three-day workshop, students will explore how to create beautiful landscapes from beginning to completion. You’ll watch Mike demo, observing as he develops a painting loosely from the beginning, exaggerating color in the block-in for more impact, making sure the temperature relationships are correct, and then gradually building the layers of texture creating a picture with rich color, depth, and energy.

Students will be taught a multi-layered approach from block-in to finish, using techniques such as glazing, dry brushing, palette knife, impasto, scumbling, and a multitude of tools to achieve a three-dimensional feel in a painting. We will cover all aspects of picture-making from drawing to values, edges, color mixing, mark making, color temperature, and brush/tool selection. Emphasis will be placed on texture, the use of impasto, mediums, and the effects they create. Subject matter will be landscapes.