Where are you stuck?

No workshop covers every problem a painting can hand you. What it can do is explain one process all the way through, illustrate it on a real painting, and leave you enough of the mechanism to build your own by taking systems apart. The famous paintings on these pages are there for the same reason. A system is easier to take apart when you can already see it working.

So the material is made to be returned to rather than watched once. When a painting stalls, the stall usually names the chapter that treats it, which makes the stall the fastest way in. Seven of them are below, each with the move to make next and where the material sits. The quoted lines are Daniel’s, from the painting demos and his podcast answers.

They repeat, and the repetition is the useful part. Teaching since he was fifteen gave him the observation plainly: “how many people have the same weaknesses or the same issues.”

The chapters these routes land in are laid out on the curriculum map, and the ones still being built say so there.

You can paint, and there is nothing you want badly enough to spend the hours on. Ideas arrive and none of them survive contact with a panel, or one gets started and dies at the halfway mark because there was never enough behind it. His version of the problem: “Starting something is easy, but how do you assemble all the pieces into something you find interesting?” The arithmetic is what makes it worth solving properly. The idea can be easy, and it can take three hundred hours to execute.

• Then take the catalog apart. In his words, “I would actually build catalogs of imagery that impacted me, and then I would deconstruct why and try to find patterns within the imagery.” The patterns are your subject matter. His came out that way, from one honest question: “why am I avoiding the types of colors that I actually like?”
• Ask what you would live with. “What would I put in my own space that I was designing and creating?” It moves the choice off what is objectively good and onto what you would want most.
• Write the idea down before it is any good. “The first sketch I put down is more of a remembering one. It doesn’t have to be pretty.” His own rule for why: perfectionism is the enemy of excellence.
• If the figure carries everything and the rest of the picture is an afterthought, run the counter-series. “A good exercise is make a few paintings without a figure in them and see where you go.” He did a year or two of them.

The idea gets tested at thumbnail size before a panel is committed to it, which is Seeing in Three Values. The rest of this work belongs to Chapter 1, Composition and Vision, on the curriculum map, where reference gets worked out too. His standard there: “I wouldn’t recommend blindly searching for some sort of image to make a copy of as a painting. But if you’re clear on what you’re doing, photo references can be very valuable.” The self-knowledge side of the same question is the style writing, starting with developing your own painting style.

Honest note: the Composition and Vision chapter is not filmed yet. What is live is the written lessons and the charts they run on.

Everything drifted to the middle. The darks lightened, the lights dulled, and a start that read from the doorway now reads as one gray field. Squint at it and the shapes no longer sort into families, which is the tell: the picture stopped being a value pattern and became a pile of individual notes.

• Flatten the shadow back down. His rule from the demos: “I like to keep my shadows flatter than the rest of the painting. And what I mean by flatter is one value.”
• Hunt the light pockets inside it. A stray light in a shadow looks like it is getting hit by light, and that is what breaks the form.
• Run the tongue twister on the picture. “The lightest lights in the shadows should be darker than the darkest darks in the light.” Find both notes and compare them.
• Then check the light itself. Two sources draw two borders, the families break into pockets, and pockets anchor nothing.

The bracket system and the two thumbnail exercises are Seeing in Three Values. The light that makes the brackets checkable is One Light, with the collapse test you can run on a kitchen table under one lamp. The figure that explains why a value only reads against its neighbours is Tonal relationships, on the color charts.

You render an eye, step back, and it is in the wrong place. So it moves, and the modeling moves with it, and the head slides for another two hours. Every correction costs you the work that came before it, which is the signature of finishing something before its location was settled.

• Draw the border between light and shadow before anything else, then fill each shadow shape flat, one value. Under one light that border holds still while everything else stays negotiable.
• Rank what you are drawing. “The largest shapes are like continents, then you have countries, then states or regions.” Erase the regions and the picture should survive. Erase the continents and nothing does.
• Measure the locations while the features are still unmodeled: the corner of an eye, the distance between the eyes, how they line up with the nose.
• Stop at the point where you can trust the shapes for the rest of the painting. The standard for this stage is his, “as accurate as necessary, not as accurate as possible.”

The whole order, with his day-two shadow-shape drill and Harold Speed’s location scaffold, is Shape Before Form. The maps it runs on, continents through regions and the shadow-shape anchor, sit on the composition charts.

The pile looks right on the palette and lands wrong on the panel. Or you get close by adding one more tube, and then the next mixture fights the last one, and the picture starts to look like several paintings that met by accident. The count is usually the culprit, not your eye.

• Balance is what a palette is for, before count. “Cohesion and balance and range is what you need for a working palette.”
• Every tube you add costs you. “A palette doesn’t get better by bringing more colors in; it gets more complex and difficult, because color harmony is really important.”
• Mix a string rather than a single note. Three piles from the same few pigments, dark, mid and light, then drag them into each other while wet and look at every border.
• Shared parents are what make the borders behave. Mid-demo: “Since these colors are very similar and I mix them using the same paints, I can make these interact pretty easily.”

The palette lesson, with the string exercise straight off the demo, is The Balance of a Palette. The charts behind it live in the color room, with a page each for the reds, yellows, greens and blues. If the mixtures are going dull rather than wrong, the causes are laid out in why an oil painting goes muddy.

You leave the easel each day with the painting slightly behind where it was. The start was alive and the hours since have cost you the thing that was working. He knows the feeling well enough to name it: what frustrates him is a piece where “it took a while and I feel like the last 50 hours made it worse instead of better.”

• Day one only adds. “Because the first day is only adding, I won’t stop. I’m not trying to fine-tune.” The cost of ignoring that is named too: “If I start fixating on a small detail early on, I stall out.”
• On the second day make only the marks that need wet paint. Anything you could do just as well next week, leave for the dry panel.
• Watch for the signature failure of projecting onto a picture instead of reading it: you “solve one thing and cause another ten problems, and do that indefinitely.”
• Give it the walk-away. He carries a piece to eighty or ninety percent, leaves it for weeks, then looks at it fresh and does the thing he wishes he had done.

The drying clock and the two-day study are The Second Day. The stop condition, and the call-it-done protocol that gets you an honest look at your own picture, are Complete, Not Finished. The Communion section of the finishing companion is where he treats the same failure at the end of a painting.

Every area is solved and the picture still does not hold. It reads as parts. You keep adding, each addition separates something else, and there is no point where it stops asking for work. This is the ordinary end state of solving a painting locally, and the cure is a change of direction rather than more effort.

• The end connects. “The end of a painting should be more about connecting it than separating it.” Beginning and end are holistic; the middle is where you go local.
• Expect the fragmentation and build the counter-move into the process. “I just know that that’s gonna happen, so I have to then develop these methods to bring things back together.”
• Find where the form broke and bridge it. A lot of finishing “is finding areas that the form is broken and building a bridge to connect it.”
• Then hold the stop condition. “Complete means when it doesn’t need anything else,” which is a lower bar than polish and a harder one to fake.

The whole last thirty percent, section by section, is Finishing Touches, the chapter companion, and the fragmentation counter-move has a section of its own there. The written lesson on the same doctrine is Complete, Not Finished.

At arm’s length every passage is handled. From the far wall the picture falls apart: the large shapes stop connecting, the form in light does not hold, and nothing leads. The detail was never the thing carrying it, and distance is the only test that says so.

• From there, ask the questions that belong to that distance. Do the larger shapes connect, is the major form in light working, are the relationships of light and shadow ones you are happy with.
• Expect the middle of this stage to look worse. Some passages are keyed and others are not, so the picture reads less cohesive for a while before it comes back together.
• Hold the direction through the awkward stretch. Adding darker value and connecting, not popping highlights.
• Ration the highlights when they do come. They go “only for the snow-capped peaks,” never a whole lit plane, because a camera inflates a highlight and copying it whole breaks the form.

The across-the-room test, and the keying and calibrating that gets a picture there, are in the finishing companion. Why the verdict changes with distance is the Tonal relationships figure on the color charts, and the edge decisions that follow it are in Complete, Not Finished.