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Accelerate your Skills with Thumbnails

🌄 Make the most of your plein-air sessions with small, purposeful studies. In this tutorial, Ellie Wilson demonstrates how tiny, thumbnail canvases can capture light and color for later studio work, eliminating the stress of hauling large canvases outdoors. Over a four-piece series, you’ll paint mountains, spruce trees, aspens, and a monumental rocky ledge while focusing on essential visual elements rather than high detail.


You’ll learn how to:
🖌️ Use small studies to quickly capture light, color, and composition
🎨 Focus on the illusion of shapes, value, edges, and colors rather than detail
📐 Prepare for plein-air trips by sketching compositional ideas instead of attempting a finished masterpiece
💡 Develop your sketching techniques to inform larger studio paintings


Perfect for artists who want to strengthen their observational skills and make their plein-air practice more effective — learning to capture the essentials and create a solid foundation for finished works. 🕒 Runtime: 2+ hours

  • Ellie Wilson

    Instructor

  • Fundamental

    Difficulty
Meet your instructor

Ellie Wilson

Ellie's life as an artist started at a young age and the path to her art career seemed to have happened effortlessly. She was born and raised in the Wasatch Mountains, which instilled in her a passion for nature and beauty. The first time Ellie went Plein Air painting with the mountains surrounding her and a brush in hand she was hooked, and decided to specialize in landscape painting. When she graduated with a BFA, she sold out her solo show and launched into her career as a professional artist. Since then she have been painting tirelessly, working to master a variety of scenes in over 6 states and 18 countries around the world. 

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