Winslow Art Center offers weekly mini-workshops online called “Technique Takeaways.” I’ve given six of these which are available to watch. $40 gives you access for one year. Click the workshop title for registration information.
Beyond Representation: Keys to Abstraction | April 2025
Many painters are drawn to abstraction, but are unsure where to begin. Is it simply a matter of taking an “anything goes” approach? Absolutely not! Abstraction requires a command of the formal elements of painting — composition, value, color, form, depth, movement — just as much as good representational painting does. The key difference? In abstraction, these formal elements become the primary visual experience, while the narrative (subject and “things”) takes a more recessive role. After a comprehensive presentation featuring diverse semi-abstract painters, and examples from his own process, Mitchell will demonstrate two exercises you can use to bring abstraction into your own work. In this Technique Takeaway, landscape painter Mitchell Albala will show practical ways of inducing abstraction:
- Ultra-simplification
- Color alteration
- Expressive mark-making
- Strong visual concept and vision
Through the Picture Window: 5 Essential Keys for Improving Your Compositions | August 2024
The first act of composition occurs when we impose a “picture window” around our subject. When we look through our viewfinders or crop the subject on the computer — but what are we actually looking for? There are several practical and easy-to-identify compositional considerations we can look for. In this in-depth Technique Takeaway, Working with various source photos, Mitchell takes demonstrates how each of these considerations are applied to make a the composition more interesting and dynamic.
- limited focus
- variation: shape size (large vs small), dark/light balance, intervals, placement of horizon line
- picture format – horizontal, vertical, or square
- movement
- “active” negative space
Building Harmony Through Color Grouping | January 2024
In the synthetic world of our two-dimensional paintings, how do we maintain the same sense of color harmony and cohesion we find in the natural world? This special Technique Takeaway explores “color grouping,” a way of maintaining harmony by organizing colors into a limited number of groups or families. Color grouping is a simple practice that, when applied to our color strategy and palette, becomes a very direct way of building unified light and color in our paintings. This session covers:
- How to evaluate subjects in terms of color grouping
- How color groups relate in terms of hue interactions, value, and saturation levels
- How color groups are organized into major and minor color chords
- How to create simple “swatch” studies of your color groups
In Search of Simplified Shapes and Movement | August 2022
In this special “double feature,” I demonstrate two powerful exercises for the landscape painter. The first, on simplification and massing, will show you how to simplify your subjects by applying a limited focus and reducing the composition to 10 shapes or less. The second exercise will show you how “map” the pathways of movement in your subjects. These exercises have been game-changers for those in my workshops. Applicable for both studio landscape and plein air work.
Smart Starts – The Power of Underpainting | Feb 2021
We spend a great deal of effort finishing a painting, but the success of a painting hinges more on a well thought out start. In this 1-½ hour presentation and demonstration, I will show you how a “smart start” can establish drawing, composition, value, and even general color direction at the outset. This Technique Takeaway will cover the traditional monochromatic underpainting and my own 2-color underpainting method.
The Power of Notan – Understanding the Ultimate Compositional Study | October 2021
The notan is a bit mysterious. It has an exotic name and is often misinterpreted as a value study — which it is not. In this concise introduction to notan, I demonstrate the contemporary approach to notan — which positions it as a type of compositional study that is uniquely suited to revealing the foundational shapes of a composition. I will show you how to do notan thumbnails from life and from photographs, so you can starting using the notan right now.