This is the first lecture in the series in which I talk about the concept of "Visual Music and Poetry". Intermediate and advanced students will also find this lecture invaluable if they have not heard of the concept before. This is probably the most important thing you will learn in painting to make your work meaningful, and to have an impact on people. In this lecture I explain each of the four components of the Visual Music and Poetry Model and why each of them is critical to your work.

The second lecture in the workshop explains exactly what values are. You need to understand this concept thoroughly because it is fundamental to the art of painting and making your paintings look real. If you get the values approximately correct in your paintings, your paintings will look real, no matter what the color is. In fact when most students say they have a color problem, 90% of the time it is a value problem.

The five-value scale is the most important color scale you will learn in your artistic career. It is the basis for creating the value pattern in your paintings and giving you a strong foundation from which you can develop your painting. It is surprisingly difficult to do. This video shows you how (for oil and acrylic painters only).

You can compare values in pairs in order to determine the remainder. This is a critical skill to master. Using this technique you can assign values to all the major shapes in your painting.

This lecture in the series will introduce you to the concept of Notan. This is the dark light harmony in your painting which is essential to making your abstract design interesting. This is a very powerful concept to understand, but when you master it, even a painting done with two or three ink pens can look beautiful.

There is one technique that you can do in one or two minutes, that will tell you if the painting you are going to work on for the next two hours is going to work or not. This is called a mass notan. This is also a great way to make little paintings when you are traveling, and to capture the essence of a design. In this lecture I show you exactly how I create these little jewels!

There are many tips and tricks to creating mass notans that will save you a lot of time. In this lecture I will go over a lot of the common problems that students have when doing these studies, and how to avoid them. This will drastically shorten the time it takes you to do these studies, giving you more time for creative thinking (or an extra cup of coffee!).

Cropping helps you simplify a scene in front of you and can help you find an interesting composition you might otherwise miss. This is an invaluable technique for helping your sense of design and composition.

Space division is how you break up the painting into shapes of different colors or different values. Good space division is one of the most important things you need to do in order to create an interesting design and create music in your painting.

A very important part of how you make your painting interesting, is how you divide up the light, dark and gray areas in your painting. This is what creates an interesting notan structure. One of the most important principles you need to understand is the idea of a dominant value.