Matt Miller
How to paint what you want your viewer to see and feel
I have wanted to write an artist’s oil painting book for quite a while. One of the problems with such a book is that it is next to impossible for the reader to absorb all the nuances of new ideas and in some cases understand what the author intends to convey by reading a few short sentences or paragraphs.
My intention with this website is to cover all the material I planned to do in a book and more. In video format I can cover difficult concepts multiple times in different ways to make it easier for artists to learn and fully understand the concepts I cover. I will also be able to show you in detail the how of what I am covering in a way that’s just impossible in a standard book.
I have categorized my video library into four basic sections: The Basics (information every artist should know but is often hard to find online), Short Instructional Demos (short to-the-point demos to illustrate particular subjects in detail), Important Lectures (short to-the-point lectures covering important theory, history, and information every artist should know), and lastly, Full Demonstrations (long several hour videos where I paint a painting from start to finish with descriptions of what I’m doing and why throughout the entire process.
On the right is a link for you to suggest demos, lectures, or full videos you would like to see that aren’t yet on the list, followed by a list of special events, and then by a list of coming soon planned videos
Please let me know what you would like to see and any feed back, good and bad.
Thank you and welcome!!
If we haven’t yet covered a topic you’d like to see let us know and we’ll add it to the list Thanks! Send us an email
Sample Videos
Recently Added Videos
SPECIAL EVENTS:
Three Day Workshop: The Three P’s: Perception, Photography, Painting – This workshop will cover:
- Day 1: Understanding perception as it pertains to art
- Day 2: Understanding photographic errors, lies, distortions, perspective shift, and depth collapse
- Day 2: Understanding how to successfully paint realistic three dimensional paintings from a photo – utilizing all we learned from the previous two day’s lessons
- DATE and PRICE: TBD
Live Demonstrations: TBD
Live Critiques: TBD
Personal Coaching/Critique session:
- $60/half hour ($45 Members)
- $120/hour ($90 Members)
- Schedule Coaching session
The Basics
COMING SOON:
- Mixing paint
- Mixing paint 1: Understanding how to mix colors – what colors mix and what colors don’t
- Mixing paint 2: painting yellow on a blue sky
- Mixing paint 3: on the palette
- Mixing paint 4: on the easel
- Carving shape with warm and cool color
- How to properly apply shadow
- Warm vs cool shadows
- How to make something come forward or recede in a painting
- Why warm colors come forward in the light but recede in the shadow, and how to use this to your advantage
- Color: Hue, Saturation, and Chrominance
- Why purple exists as a color: it shouldn’t and why a color wheel works
- edge perception and enhancement: how our eyes preprocess and enhance edges before our brain is involved and the impact that has on painting three dimensions.
- Why we are blind to gradual value changes
- Color theory: Part 1
- Color theory: Part 2
- Mixing colors: The basics
- How to avoid muddy and chalky color and how to fix it if you need to
- How to properly apply varnish to a painting
- The solvent free studio: how to paint without OMS or Turp
- Speed of Light Part 2: cloth textures
- Simplify simplify simplify
- Simplification Demo: painting an orange slice
- Painting from photos: the problems, distortions, and issues
- EDGES: the heart and soul of a painting
- Lost and found edges
- EDGES: how to let light flow through a painting
- How Edges affect value
- How to make a painted object glow
- How to make something look bright with paint
- How to paint a sunset
- How to paint a recognizable portrait: important features to recognize a face
- Painting skin tone: with geometry
- Building geometry with temperature not value
- How to describe a turning form
- Core shadow
- Selecting a shadow color
- The quality of shadow: how dark should it be
- How ambient light effects your shadow
- Finding / selecting skin color in a portrait
- Painting from a photo and all the prerequisites needed to know before painting from photos
- Understanding warm and cool color
- First color dictates…
- What is background vs foreground in a painting
- The color of the air
- Photographic distortions and how to mitigate them
- and much more