Here’s a glimpse of what’s in store for you:

Palette knives — remove mystery and add mastery!
Create a story and then tell it through your painting
Include all the details (without all the work!)
Bridge brush and palette knife techniques to bring a dynamic dimension to your paintings
Plan your focal point (and then stick to the plan!)
Create unique paintings that showcase your talent and set you apart from traditional, brush-only painters (your viewers and buyers will love it!)
Say yes to drama in value patterns!
Freshen up your techniques to further develop your own personal style (Michele shows you how!)
Bring life by adding figures, giving them their own personalities with a simple stroke of the knife!
Good planning leads to great precision (you’ll never want to skip this part again!)
Find the fun and freedom that only a palette knife can offer!
Orchestrate color to maximize energy, movement, and excitement
Manipulate your paint so it does what you want!
See for yourself how a palette knife inherently adds an impressionistic feel (and a lot more pizzazz!)
Ever use a Thrust Map? You will now!
… And SO much more!!

If you’ve been looking for a way to enhance your painting style, you’re in for a very pleasant surprise. This may contain just what you’ve been looking for: a refreshing new approach that will bring in the zing and zest your paintings are missing.

Award-winning artist Michele Byrne is going to show you how to blend the best of both worlds — beautiful brushwork and amazing palette knife techniques, all in one painting. Heck, this is the greatest matchup since peanut butter and jelly!

You’re Not Cheating on Your Brushes!

Let’s face it, we’re all in a serious relationship with our paintbrushes. We don’t just randomly choose one and hope it works out. Nope … we carefully make our selections, willingly spend our hard-earned cash on them, treat them with great care, and, when we find a favorite, buy another one just like it. It’s bliss...

And now we’re asking you to add a palette knife or two to the relationship — it just feels so wrong!

But don’t worry, you’re not breaking up with your brushes. They’re still going to get plenty of time and attention from you. You’ll just be adding a fun new element that will generate a lot of excitement in your paintings — exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Creating the Roadmap for Painting Success

Michele encourages you to start each painting like it’s going to be the best painting you’ll ever do … and then shows you how to keep things fun and stay optimistic as you work through, and overcome, painting challenges.

Finding that many artists tend to skip the foundational steps of drawing and perspective to get right into painting, Michele begins by teaching you to develop careful drawings, value studies, and color studies that will become the roadmap for your entire painting. In fact, Michele calls part of this plan a “Thrust Map.”

Starting strong will help you avoid trouble down the road … you’ll be so glad you slowed down and took the time to create this map before you started your journey.

From there, she’ll guide you through every step — design, composition, values, color, and edges. You’ll see exactly how Michele creates vibrant impressionistic and believable scenes that showcase movement and action. Most importantly, you’ll see how you can manipulate the paint with your palette knife to create the illusion of small details without ever having to actually paint them in!

Adding palette knife techniques to what you’re already doing in brush painting is like spreading delightful icing on a beautiful cake! You’ll savor the energy of the spontaneous effects a knife can give. You’ll celebrate the joy of mixing paint to achieve bold, glowing colors and then applying them in generous amounts to create texture and luminosity.

Go ahead, invite a palette knife to your party, and see just how much fun you’ll have with it!

Course Categories

Learn to paint landscapes and figures with a palette knife from these top-selling artists.