Lisa welcomes you and sets the stage for the demonstration ahead. You’ll learn how she approaches a new painting — from choosing a subject that compels her, to filtering through complexity to find the harmony in a scene. She shares how generations of painters in her family have influenced her work, and what she hopes to pass along to you here.

Lisa reviews her supplies — a focused palette of six oil colors, her preferred brushes, and the canvas she trusts — explaining the why behind each choice. You’ll also discover how she gathers inspiration, creates a reference board of images and sketches, and works through a small oil study to establish the feeling she wants the final painting to carry.

Lisa translates her thinking into doing — massing in the color and value of the main shapes to create relationships between land, water, and sky. Starting with a light charcoal sketch, she goes right into color, covering the canvas to create a space you can “walk into.” You’ll learn how to let masses flow into each other for natural harmony, how reflections work, how sky color changes with distance, and the importance of clean color at this stage.

You’ll continue working around the painting to build a strong foundation of shape, color temperature, and value. Lisa shares how to connect shapes intentionally, create atmosphere in the sky, paint reflections on wet sand, and secure the relationships between elements. Before moving on, she shows you how to check that the feeling you want is already present — so the next stage of refinement builds on something that already works.

Moving to smaller brushes, Lisa pulls the sky and horizon together with more thoughtful, careful marks. You’ll learn how to build color without getting it muddy, develop form in clouds and reflections, and stay aware of your own tendencies as you paint. As Lisa puts it: “Know your own pitfalls... and your strengths. Be self-aware as you paint.”

Lisa develops and shapes the sand, using light and shadow to define the ripples and movement that lead you into the painting. You’ll learn perspective tips for laying in ripples so they gradually recede, how to make a complex sandy beach look simple, and how the sand itself influences the color of reflections.

Taking each element one at a time, Lisa shows how to develop the canoe and land mass while continuing to think of the painting as a whole. You’ll learn the art of subtle color shifts, how to use elements like seaweed to guide the viewer’s eye, and when you may need to unpaint — softening details or removing distracting shapes to keep the painting from becoming fragmented.

In this final chapter, Lisa knits together all the pieces of the painting. You’ll see how final subtle shifts can make all the difference, how to recover when a mark doesn’t work, and how having a plan and sticking to it gets you to a successful finish. As Lisa reassures: it’s just oil paint.