A painter's blocking-in lab
See any painting the way a painter plans one: first as a map of light and dark, then as a handful of flat color shapes you build up one at a time. Bring your own photo or learn from the masters, and print a paint-along brochure as a PDF.
Every great painting began as a few quiet shapes of light and color. Choose one, and watch it fall back into its bones, the values first, then the color laid in mass by mass, the way the painter once built it up.
Two ways painters plan a picture. Pick a master work or upload your own, and follow along.
The value study
Squint at any painting and the detail falls away, leaving big shapes of light and dark. That arrangement, the values, is what makes a picture read across the room. Get it wrong and no amount of color saves it.
We reduce the image to 2, 3, or 5 tones, then show it building up one tone at a time, like a pencil study. You see the structure the artist hung everything else on.
The color block-in
Up close a painting looks like endless shades, but it's really a handful of flat color shapes. We find that small set of colors and the regions each one fills, keeping the vivid accents that give a painting its life.
Watch the masses go down by coverage, the largest first, get a paint-along stencil for every color, and print the whole thing as a PDF brochure to work from at the easel.
Everything runs on your image as-is. Uploads are processed on our server in memory and never stored. Read more →
