Learn to Paint Light with Paulo Jimenez!
Starry Night Gallery, Daytona Beach

Class Overview

Learn to paint one of the most essential and beautiful elements in art: light. In this four-week class, you will complete two paintings while exploring how light changes color, creates atmosphere, defines form, and gives a painting its sense of glow. Through step-by-step demonstrations and individual instruction, students will work in oil or acrylic and learn palette knife techniques for expressive shapes, texture, broken color, and luminous highlights.

What You'll Learn

• How to see and organize light and shadow

• How value creates luminosity

• Warm and cool color relationships

• Color mixing for glowing light

• Soft, hard, and lost edges

• Palette knife techniques for texture and highlights

• How to simplify a photograph into paintable shapes

• How to keep a painting loose and painterly

Class Structure
 

This beginner-friendly course spans four weeks, with each session building on the last. Classes meet once a week for three hours, combining demonstrations with hands-on painting and individual guidance. No previous painting experience is necessary—just bring your curiosity and your own oil or acrylic supplies (two 12" × 16" canvases recommended).

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Weeks 1–2: Painting Light in the Sky
Using a dramatic cloudscape as reference, learn how to create the illusion of glowing sunlight within clouds. Explore value, warm and cool color, atmospheric depth, edges, and palette knife techniques.

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Weeks 3–4: Painting Sunlight Indoors
Using sunlight entering through a window as reference, learn how to simplify a scene into large shapes of light and shadow. Explore cast shadows, reflected light, warm and cool color, lost edges, and palette knife techniques for luminous highlights and broken color.

Hands-On Projects
Complete two finished paintings—one sky study and one indoor light study. Each project is developed over two sessions, giving you time to build confidence with light, color, and painterly technique.