The curriculum: process, chapter by chapter
A painting moves in an order, and the order is something you build rather than inherit. So this is a curriculum about process. It explains how the systems actually work, a palette, a value pattern, the shapes under a portrait, the light on a form, and it hands each one back to you as an exercise you can run on a kitchen table.
It is built from Daniel’s own teaching, the transcripts of him working at the easel, and the public-domain canon the old academies drew on. The diagrams and the writing are made to say the same thing two ways, one drawn and one spoken. It grows as the teaching does, so some chapters are further along than others, and the ones still being built say so.
What Is Process
Design is the core of the workshop, and this chapter is the overview. Things move in an order, and the work is to build a system for that order rather than inherit one whole.
Composition and Vision
You take an idea and turn it into a simplified composition inside a frame, distilled through several iterations of pencil sketches into something you can actually paint. The three-value breakdowns live here, reference gets worked out here, and this chapter carries the heaviest load of diagrams in the workshop.
The whole value scale compressed to three brackets, and two exercises: Speed’s mass drawing, then thumbnails at true proportions.
Shapes ranked as continents, countries, regions, and two exercises: his day-two shadow-shape drill, then Speed’s location scaffold.
One light draws one border, and the one-light drill: the collapse test with one lamp, then the choosing study under four.
The charts these lessons run on sit on the composition page.
Surfaces
The surface you paint on, and how it is prepared.
This chapter is being built. No lesson is up for it yet.
Color, palette, materials
What makes a palette work, and the charts and mixing that sit under it.
The palette and color charts sit on the color page, with a page each for the reds, yellows, greens, and blues.
Figure and Form
Understanding form and perspective. It ties back to the composition chapter but gets more structural: basic perspective and the horizon line early, the structure of the figure later.
Its charts already sit on the form page. No lesson is written for this chapter yet.
Finishing
Finishing touches. A lighter load of diagrams here, since the close-ups and finished examples are mostly carried by video.
The finishing figures live on the composition and color pages for now.