Minute Painting Videos

(Updated and bumped from a previous post): Here are the first five of a series of short videos I’m working on to briefly explain various ideas in painting (un-embedded Playlist version).

If you’ve seen them before only the fourth (on the use of the mirror) is new.

If the music is annoying you can turn down the volume, it took me twice as long to find inoffensive royalty-free music as it did to film and edit the movies.
Let me know what you think.


Using a cuttlebone.


Scraping down.


Making a medium.


Using the mirror.


Sight-size in plein-air landscape painting.

Update: Here is #7 (I know I skipped 6, it’s coming).

Preparing gessoed panels.

26 comments

  1. Wow those are great lessons!
    I am going to try the palletknife softening the edges also on landscapes.

    I gess the sepia is also good for the blanc canvas before painting, I recently did have problems that you can get the dry wallnutpaint ‘easy’ scraped of with a fingernail, Iit scared the &%$#@ out of me.

  2. thank you for those: i found them all informative and fun to watch… almost comic strip style. there is a lot packed neatly into a small space of time, easy to follow and i didn’t feel i needed to read more than what you had given as everything was so clearly demonstrated….. another thank you and more please:)

  3. As with all of your work which I love very much – I love these videos. I really appreciate you sharing the knowledge. I think they are wonderful because they are well made. In the first video I wish I could have seen the end result after applying the technique.

  4. Great little tip videos… thanks for making them available.

    One thing I’ve learned when mixing with Canada Balsam… the mixing goes a lot easier if you run the capped mix bottle under hot tap water for several minutes….

  5. Great stuff Marc. Thanks for these. I second some of the comments above, very concise and pretty neat overall. My only critique on the production is that I’d personally prefer the music a little quieter, but that’s nothing I couldn’t solve on my end by turning it down.

    I look forward to more. Keep it up.

  6. great tips and fabulous music. good pace (not boring but not too fast) too. could you do one on the alizarin crimson in the sky trick?

  7. i didn’t find the background tunes distracting.

    i appreciated that the video clips were kept to a minimum (up to 120 seconds) and the captions appear where appropriate. i personally find that memory retention seems greater if the video clip is kept under 120 seconds. i’m sure milage will vary from person to person.

    looking forward to more tips.

  8. These videos were really fun to watch, you have a subtle sense of humor in you explanations, the music works great, I could listen to anything for a minute anyway. I was unfamiliar with the cuttle bone, Canada Balsam, and scraping out portraits as a part of ones routine, rather then when one just messes things up. Also, I had only seen sight size used in figurative work. Jim McVicker recommended that I check out your work, it is really lovely, am an instant fan!

  9. I use the mirror technique often when creating logo’s or marks…often turn them upside down as well! – I also look at the mirror -mirror image of myself too and often reflect on what others really see – as we are tricked by this on the daily when we look in the mirror! hahaa…

  10. Hello Marc, sorry to bother you but I have to propose a technical question: given that lately in Italy the weather is always bad, I would like to ask you if the preparation of the sun thickened linseed oil linseed oil thickens due to the heat of the sun or due to sunlight? I ask this because I would have thought possibly to use the lamps that mimic sunlight to thicken the oil, do you think it can work?

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