In the studio with artist, photographer and instructor Robert Louis Caldwell

It may seem silly, but I can not express how happy I am that I have finally found and purchased my first plaster casts! I started instructing students in 2010 and have wanted to purchase plaster casts to use in my drawing and painting instruction since then. I have only bought my first three, a male foot, a female hand, and the Mary mask from Michelangelo's Pieta. Drawing from plaster casts is terrific because the plaster does not create any harsh highlights allowing the artist to focus more accurately on the transitions of values. They are excellent teaching aid and have been used for a long time. I can not wait to draw these, create future drawing courses, and create reference images for my students.

 I took a break from teaching classes for the week of Thanksgiving, but I didn’t sit around twiddling my thumbs; I recorded two new sketching courses. The two new courses finish my introductory sketching courses focusing on a simple subject matter with relatively no textures. The first one in this set is already available, titled Still Life - Eggs and a Creamer; the additional two will be titled Still Life - Eggs and a Cup and Still Life - Teapot and a Creamer. As I mentioned, the subject matter for these introductory sketching courses is being kept simple. An artist can focus on the purpose of my sketching classes, see the larger shapes first, and then break them down into smaller and smaller shapes. I continually stress to my students not to get bogged down by the details but to focus on the larger shapes that support the details, to see through the curtain of details. To work from general to specific. Now that I have the courses recorded, I will spend the next week editing the v...

It has taken me six months to get to this point, where I can now successfully create an instructional video that looks good and communicates the instruction in the manner that I wish it to. If you had told me back in March of this year that by the end of the year, I would be able to create a video that looks like the one below, I would have asked you what you had been smoking! It seems like it would be easy to create an instructional video, but many variables go into creating a successful video. The first part is how you want to communicate what you are trying to teach. It was imperative for me that you can see what I am drawing and painting clearly and that you can also see the reference that I am looking at and zoom in on it and mark up the reference. I also wanted to include a picture in a picture of me when I am talking and painting classes a picture in a picture of my palette. I also wanted to make sure that I could add a graphic letting you know what pencil or brush I currently h...

 It is almost October, and I am getting ready to start my next round of instructional courses, and I thought pumpkin still lifes would make the perfect subject. While taking the reference photos, I got a bit carried away with setting up the still lifes and took more images than I could need for this go-around. I narrowed it down to seven different images after looking through them, cropping, and editing. My goal is to create one drawing course, one intermediate-level painting course, and one intermediate/advanced course from the still lifes. I have selected two images to choose from for my drawing course, two images for my intermediate painting course, and three different images for my intermediate-advanced course. Decisions, decisions... decisions? And that is why I am writing this post today to get feedback from you, my students, on which one in each category I should choose.

  As I am getting back into my daily and weekly routine, albeit a different routine from a few months ago, I find time to get back into my stack of books that I want to read. Over the past week, I picked up my copy of “Traditional Oil Painting; Advanced Techniques and Concepts from the Renaissance to the Present,” written by Artist Virgil Elliot, an artist I respect. I am only a few chapters into the book so far, and I am again grateful to be reading another book that stresses the importance of a traditional approach to learning how to draw and paint. Virgil emphasizes the importance of learning to draw first, then starting to paint with only black and white paint before moving on to color. The more and more I read these books that outline the traditional approach to a fine arts education, the more I become dissatisfied with the arts education that I received and see the many holes in the curriculum taught to me. The book is filled with great information, but the introduction chapt...

I believe I have honed my video editing skills a bit more with the release of my recorded online course for Basic Perspective . In this foundational course, I walk students through the basic concepts of perspective, discussing the importance of the horizon line, vanishing points, and perspective lines. Then how we use them in one-point and two-point perspectives. The last exercise in this course is fun because we create a street scene without using a reference completely using a two-point perspective. We may not need to use perspective as dramatically as we do in the exercise for this course, but we need to be aware of perspective issues in our drawings and paintings. This course gives you the ability to spot potential problems in your work. The recorded version allows learning at your own pace, starting and stopping the video as needed, and you can ask a question in the comment section of the lesson that I will answer. Learn more by visiting the Basic Perspective course . The complete...

 Find your own voice but build it on a solid foundation of understanding value, color, and design. I thought I would share three new paintings created by different students to highlight their approach, application, and level of detail each created in their finished works. First and foremost, in my work and my instruction, I push value and constantly remind all of my students of the importance of creating a strong contrast in value. The strong value contrasts grab a viewer’s attention from across a room and pull them in. My students can tell you that the phrase they hear from me the most is “Go darker.” The pieces below show that the black and white version holds up very well in black and white. The other part that I wanted to highlight is the approach to each painting; one student approaches her painting as I do in the indirect painting method, building the painting with layers. Another jumped in using the direct method and created the painting in one layer. And the third painting ...

So, my grand idea moving forward is to offer several new instructional classes a month, short classes that are only a few hours, and multi-day classes. Both of which I want to prerecord so I can offer them immediately to the students who took the live online class. I didn’t realize the tremendous learning curve there would be in learning how to use and edit Adobe Premiere, a video editing program. I started Wednesday of this past week and just finished the promo video (Saturday at 10:15 pm) for my live online class Painting Technique - Cloud Study I that I am offering on September 2, 2020. I also put together the preliminary lessons that will need to be completed before the day of the class. My brain hurts immensely and my back hurts from parking my rear end in a chair for days on end but I am happy with the results. And I feel like Neo from the movie Matrix when he downloaded to his brain how to fight in martial arts and he turns to Morpheus and says “I know Kung Fu!” Of course, after...

End of an era, the Midlothian Art Academy sign in the county dump Well, I guess the first post on this blog, in a long time, should be about why I am back here. It was not my intention to build an online art school platform; well, maybe that isn’t the complete truth. In 2016 I had initially thought about creating some online instructional content, but then I had the opportunity to open my art school studio. I started with a 1200 square foot space that I designed and constructed consisting of a teaching studio, a small personal studio, and an exhibition space. And it was going rather well, and in hindsight, I should have stayed in that spot. I had brought on other instructors, and we had multiple class offerings, so it made sense to expand. In September 2019, I moved the academy into the new building, two large teaching studios, an administration office, a waiting area with a library, my studio, my lead instructor’s studio, John Sims, and a framing/storage room. I would be lying if I di...