Welcome to the Building Essentials – I Art Course! If you’ve ever asked the question, “Where do I start?” you’ve come to the right place. This course is designed to get you started on your way to building the necessary skills to become a successful painter.
This art course is the first in our “Ten-Minute-A-Day” series. Each painting in this series is designed to break the painting process down into easy, step-by-step instructions so that you can be successful with your very first painting. We start with baby steps and build from there. Each painting in the Building Essentials series and every lesson in this course will give you the skills and confidence to succeed as a painter. To become a great artist, you need to learn the basic skills of the Alexander method of wet-on-wet oil painting. Going through this course will teach you what you need to know to be successful in the wet-on-wet painting method. Bill Alexander was one of the greatest teachers who ever lived because he made the complex process of painting simple and easy to understand. His teaching process is easy to follow especially since we’ve made the process even better by breaking each painting into a series of easy to follow lessons. We have more courses planned for the near future.
Each painting in this series comes with an outline of the objectives of each painting and the techniques you will learn. We have also included a grid for each painting so you can resize them for any size canvas. In fact, we would recommend you start with a smaller canvas rather than attempting to recreate Bill’s painting on his larger surface. We would recommend you start with a 12″ X 16″ canvas and work up from there. But feel free to tackle these paintings on a larger canvas if you want. We have been very careful in selecting what we think are the easiest paintings in our library for this beginner series.
We would suggest you complete each painting in order. We begin painting #1 (Steel Lake) using only two colors. The next three paintings use only three colors. The final painting, Glacier Bay, uses a total of five colors. Even though you will be using only a few colors, you will create beautiful paintings you will be proud to hang on your living room wall or give as gifts to friends and family.
Feel free to post questions to our new Facebook group. We monitor the group regularly and will respond to questions from students. Welcome to the program and let’s get started!