Learning to See: From Confusion to Confidence

What's inside:

Welcome — A short welcome to set the tone. This is deliberately simple, mistakes are part of the process, and you'll know exactly what's coming.

1. What to Put on Your Palette (First Painting) — Just two colours: raw umber and white. Your first real, finished piece — a value study — made with the simplest possible materials.

2. Mixing Without Making Mud — Learn to match a colour exactly, using a method built around matching what you actually see rather than mixing from charts. Your first genuine "I couldn't do this yesterday" moment.

3. Same Subject, This Time in Colour — Add light and shadow colour to the same subject, anchored to the values you already trust. The foundation doesn't change — colour builds on top of it.

4. Which Brush for Which Job — A close look at brush choice, texture, and edges — hard versus soft, and why it matters.

5. Why Your Painting Looks Flat (and How to Fix It) — A trickier setup and the big-shape approach: simplifying what you see into large masses before any detail creeps in.

6. A Second Pass (and Why It's Not Scary) — Build real form through simple layered sessions, and get straight, jargon-free answers on fat-over-lean and sinking-in.

7. The Finish — Bring it all together, adding just enough detail to make the piece come alive. You'll finish with a complete, real piece of work.