A Painting That Needed a Second Pass Welcome to another Tonal Landscape Oil Painting Demonstration. I’m Michael Francis McCarthy, and the painting I’m bringing you today is called Violet Dusk. The Reference and Its Problems This painting is based on a photo I...
Transcript and Key Insights It’s morning, 9:32 on the 29th of April, 2026. Clear blue sky, no clouds. We’re going to make a painting now. This reference has one big issue. What I call all in a row syndrome, distant row of trees...
Every color on your palette should earn its place Welcome back. This is part two of our palettes and pigments deep dive, we’re picking up where we left off with the oranges and reds. I’ve got two solid outlines to get us through...
Tonalism, art history’s forgotten movement (Part 1) This is going to be a two-part talk about Tonalism. This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I’m not an art historian, and I’m not much of a writer either, but we make...
Today, I’m sharing Violet Woods, a 6×8 I painted last week. It’s based on a landscape I painted in around 2019, you can still find that wider version on the channel. This is a cropped, more intimate take on that same scene. The...
The colors you choose matter profoundly. They’re not just tubes of paint sitting on your palette, they’re the foundation of every decision you’ll make during the painting process. Today I’re the foundation of every decision you’ll make during the painting process. Today I...
I painted Violet Woods back in 2019. Today we’re painting it again, and this time I want to explore something that fascinated me about the original: the use of violet in the underpainting, mixed into burnt umber and burnt sienna. It’s an approach...
Welcome to another tonalist landscape oil painting demonstration. This is Woolies Bay Afternoon, a five by seven I painted last week. I want to talk about why I painted it and what it shows about how painting actually works. The Postcard I’ve been...
Revisiting a coastal scene I’m painting a five by seven postcard-sized piece today. It’s Willy’s Bay, a scene I’ve been thinking about for a while. There’s a gallery I like near there—good people—and I want to create a card they can use to...
We covered a lot of ground in part one—the essence of Tonalism, its defining characteristics, the role of figures, time of day, scene selection, finding beauty locally, and the historical context. We also talked about how Tonalism is more subjective than objective, and...