$137.97 $97.97
You Save 28% ($40.00) 
DVDs ship in 10-14 business days
Watch ARC Living Master John Pototschnik Turn One Ordinary Landscape Into Four Unique Paintings — Golden Hour, Moonlight, Snow, and Fog — Without Changing Palettes!
Internationally renowned artist John Pototschnik is going to show you how to put any weather, any season, and any light into your landscapes with one simple reversal that most artists get wrong.
It’s the “mood first” order of operations, and it changes everything downstream of it.
Inside The Three-Color Secret: Master Any Mood, Any Light, John proves something most artists never see demonstrated: the mood of a painting is a decision you make, not a condition you inherit from your reference photo or even what you see in front of you.
“It’s value, not color, that creates a painting’s mood. Color only enhances it.”
— John Pototschnik
Most instruction stops at explaining that. John proves it, by holding everything still except the mood.
He uses one photograph of a pastoral landscape, complete with a weathered barn and silo, taken on a brightly lit summer afternoon, and paints it four separate times in four unique ways. Same barn. Same tree. Same field. Same three primary colors, plus black and white.
There was no snow that day. No fog rolled in. The moon never rose over that silo. The sun was not setting. John built those four paintings from decades of watching how nature actually behaves, and from a value structure he chose before touching the surface.
Once you’ve watched all four demonstrations, you’ll look at your own reference photos and plein air studies and see possibilities that were never recorded.
Born in St. Ives, England, John Pototschnik grew up in Kansas, in the American heartland. He has spent a lifetime painting the rural landscape he knows best. Farms. Small towns. Weather moving across open country.
He trained at Wichita State University and at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he first understood that color is more than hue; it carries value and intensity as well. Then came 10 years in Dallas advertising as a freelance illustrator, and in 1982, the turn to fine art.
In those early years, John painted the way most artists do, with 10 to 15 tubes of color on the palette. Around 1985, he met a Midwest painter named Bob Tommey, who worked with just three primaries. John spent the next two weeks doing nothing but mixing color. Harmony came easily, and his work improved almost immediately.
Around that same time, he began painting seriously on location, made far simpler by the smaller palette. And the more afternoons he spent outdoors, the more he came to understand how nature actually behaves: what makes fog different from haze, how snow takes color from everything around it, what happens to contrast after the sun goes down. That accumulated knowledge is what allows him to paint weather that isn’t in front of him.
Today his paintings hang in private and public collections across the country. He is a Living Master with the Art Renewal Center, a Signature member of Oil Painters of America, and a Master Signature Emeritus member of the Outdoor Painters Society. His work has appeared in PleinAir Magazine, The Artist’s Magazine, and Southwest Art. He has received the George Washington Honor Medal and recognition in Who’s Who in American Art, and has served as a speaker, juror, and past president of both Artists and Craftsmen Associated and the Plano Art Association. Alongside a weekly blog written for more than a decade, John has produced several best-selling books and courses with Streamline Publishing.
But what his students tend to mention first isn’t that list. It’s that he explains things plainly, works at an unhurried pace, and doesn’t waste paint or your time.
PART 1: Setting the Stage (20 min.)
1 — Introduction
2 — Materials & Palette
PART 2: Four Painting Demos
Demonstration One — Golden Hour (118 min.)
3 — Set the Tone
4 — Drawing
5 — Color Mixing
6 — Set the Shadows
7 — Add Foreground & Midground
8 — Add the Sky & the Tree
9 — Work All Over
10 — The Odds & Ends
Demonstration Two — Nocturne (61 min.)
11 — Color Mixing
12 — Lay In the Darks
13 — Work Top Down
14 — Block In the Foreground
15 — Finish the Midground
16 — Refinements
17 — Final Touches & Adjustments
Demonstration Three — Snow Day (65 min.)
18 — Review the Subject
19 — Lay in the Darks
20 — Paint the Sky
21 — Develop the Painting
22 — Refinements
23 — Final Touches
Demonstration Four — A Foggy Day (50 min.)
24 — Review the Subject
25 — Work Top Down
26 — Develop the Painting
27 — Refinements & Final Touches
PART 3: Closing - 1
28 — The Three-Color Secret
Extra Bonuses:
