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Watch Award-Winning Artist Michele Usibelli Transform a Simple Neighborhood House and Garden Into a Painting Full of Light and Life Using the “Fearless Stroke Blueprint”.
Learn How To Create Expressive Oil Paintings Without Sacrificing a Single Ounce of Control!
Award-winning artist and former architect Michele Usibelli is going to show you how to turn a complex scene loaded with architectural detail and lush garden color into an oil painting that pulses with energy and life, using a simple reversal of the step most painters get wrong.
It’s the “plan first, paint fearlessly” order of operations, and it changes everything downstream of it.
Inside Free & Fearless: Creating Paintings With Energy, Michele demonstrates something most oil painting instruction never attempts: the reason a painting looks alive and spontaneous has almost nothing to do with speed or looseness ... and everything to do with how deliberately each decision was made before the brush ever moved.
“People think it looks like I’ve painted a painting quickly, but every stroke is very calculated and I take my time building it.”
— Michele Usibelli
Most painting instruction teaches you to render. Michele teaches you to decide. And she proves it, by standing in front of a subject so visually complex it should be impossible to simplify ... and showing you exactly how she controls it.
She paints a house in her own neighborhood surrounded by a gorgeous sweep of garden flowers ... a scene loaded with perspective, architectural detail, lush color and enough visual information to paralyze any painter ... with just two brush shapes (bright and filbert) and a palette organized for clean color from the very first stroke. One neighborhood scene. Bold decisions. No overworking. No going back.
There are no individually rendered petals in those flower beds. No brick-by-brick accounting of the house. No photographic fidelity in the foliage. Michele built this painting coming from a deep empathy and understanding of structure that most painters never develop, and a plan she finalized in her mind days before the brush ever moved.
Once you’ve watched the full demonstration, you’ll stand in front of your own subjects and see connected darks, focal priorities, and color temperature shifts ... instead of a tangle of details so overwhelming you don’t know where to begin.
What You’ll Discover Inside:
...and so many more insights from a painter whose architectural training became the foundation for artwork that stops people in their tracks!
Meet Your New Instructor, Michele Usibelli!
Michele Usibelli didn’t follow the typical path into painting. She earned an architecture degree from the University of Washington, spending years learning to think in terms of structure, spatial relationships, balance and proportion.
Then she made a bold decision. As a mother of three young children, she chose to follow her passion for painting. Not as a hobby. As a commitment. That takes the very fearlessness the course title promises.
She immersed herself in the Russian Impressionist tradition, studying masters who understood that a single, well-placed stroke of color can do more work than twenty tentative ones: Nicolai Fechin, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase.
What emerged was something genuinely rare: a painter who thinks like an architect and paints like an impressionist. Her compositions never fall apart because she understands structure. Her brushwork never stiffens because she learned from masters who valued the courage of a confident mark.
Her work has been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. She has won numerous awards, including the Silver Medal Award at the Salmagundi Club in New York City and the UCI Institute and Museum of California Art Award. Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of the University of Alaska Fairbanks/Museum of the North and the State of Hawaii.
But what her students mention first isn’t the awards. It’s that she’s bold, passionate, direct and specific. She paints shapes, not things. She plans everything in her mind for days before the brush moves. And she teaches from a genuine love of helping artists break through the habits that keep their paintings safe, stiff and frustratingly “nice.”
“Be bold, be fearless. I can’t teach you to ‘GO FOR IT’ ... that comes from the heart.”
— Michele Usibelli
Chapter Breakdown
PART 1: Setting the Stage
Introduction
Materials
PART 2: The Demonstration
Preparing to Paint
Lay in Darkest Darks
Establish the Focal Area
Build Out & Carve In
Final Touches
EXTRAS
Bonuses:
* High-Speed View of the demonstration painting for your learning convenience
* Exhibit of Works: Gallery of Michele Usibelli’s paintings set to music for your creative inspiration
* Insights from the Artist: Interview with Michele Usibelli by Eric Rhoads for insights and motivation
