Michele previews every technique you will learn in this demonstration. One painting. One clear process. A house in her neighborhood surrounded by a gorgeous sweep of flowers, and the decisions that make it come alive on canvas.
Discover the “Fearless Stroke Blueprint” That Creates Expressive Oil Paintings Without Sacrificing a Single Ounce of Control
Plan with precision … paint with freedom … preserve the energy. Award-winning artist and former architect Michele Usibelli reveals her complete five-stage decision process — from the mental planning she does days before paint touches canvas … to the final palette-knife accent that makes the focal point sing. If you want paintings that look alive, this changes everything.
HURRY, DISCOUNT ENDS SOON!
Available in both Streaming and DVD Formats
00Days
00Hours
00Minutes
00Seconds
If you’re not satisfied with the results of your oil paintings, and you want to know the secrets behind successful artwork that actually gets noticed, you’re about to find out.
Oil painting is deeply rewarding, but it can also be deeply frustrating. You put in the hours. You study the techniques. And somehow, the finished canvas still doesn’t carry the energy you felt when you first imagined it.
According to Michele, most paintings don’t succeed because the artist didn’t have a set “plan” for how the painting was going to be built.
Like a symphony without a conductor, a painting without a plan will be chaotic and lifeless, no matter how skilled the hands that made it.
But this isn’t just any plan…
Every confident stroke in this painting was decided before the brush touched the canvas. Michele shows you exactly how.
Michele’s approach is different from that of other artists, and it’s the reason she’s able to create award-winning paintings that look utterly spontaneous, even though every single stroke was calculated. Her secret?
She plans every composition in her mind for days before the brush ever moves.
We call her method the “Fearless Stroke Blueprint.”
Michele’s “Fearless Stroke Blueprint” will:
…help you plan your painting with precision so every brushstroke has purpose…
…help you establish the right values, the right focal point, and the right color temperature in the right order…
…and most importantly, prevents the overworking, the mud, and the “corrected-to-death” finish that kills energy in so many talented painters’ work!
Sounds amazing, right?
Luckily, her process is clear enough that any dedicated painter can follow along and see results too…. Without having to have had years of study or a career in architecture!
And that’s not all Michele is sharing.
Together with Michele, you’re going to discover ways to strengthen your composition … master negative shape painting … keep every color clean and vibrant … handle complex subjects with architectural elements … use color saturation strategically … and so much more.
After watching her entire process in action, your oil paintings will never feel stiff or lifeless again. In fact, even your paintings in other mediums will become more dynamic, because the method she shares can be applied to any painting.
Available in both Streaming and DVD Formats
Meet Your New Instructor
Michele Usibelli!
Michele Usibelli is a versatile artist with a unique and instantly recognizable style. Her work is characterized by its loose brushstrokes, bold colors, and strong sense of light and shadow. Michele is drawn to many different painting genres, including still life, landscape, cityscapes, and figurative work.
However, it’s her individual style and paint application that create a constant theme throughout her body of work.
Michele's early training in the Russian Impressionist tradition gave her a strong foundation in seeing and painting shapes of light and color. She has been influenced by numerous artists, including Nicholai Fechin, John Singer Sargent, and William Merritt Chase. These influences have allowed her to develop her own unique artistic voice, both technically proficient and emotionally expressive.
Her work has been shown in solo and group 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 work is also included in the permanent collections of the University of Alaska Fairbanks/Museum of the North and the State of Hawaii.
In addition to her painting, Michele is a passionate instructor. She conducts ongoing workshops and art demonstrations throughout the United States and around the globe. This impressive mixture of skill and experience also makes her a popular juror for art competitions.
Michele is a true artist, with a deep love of painting and a commitment to her craft. This is your chance to learn from her!
However, it’s her individual style and paint application that create a constant theme throughout her body of work.
Michele's early training in the Russian Impressionist tradition gave her a strong foundation in seeing and painting shapes of light and color. She has been influenced by numerous artists, including Nicholai Fechin, John Singer Sargent, and William Merritt Chase. These influences have allowed her to develop her own unique artistic voice, both technically proficient and emotionally expressive.
Her work has been shown in solo and group 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 work is also included in the permanent collections of the University of Alaska Fairbanks/Museum of the North and the State of Hawaii.
In addition to her painting, Michele is a passionate instructor. She conducts ongoing workshops and art demonstrations throughout the United States and around the globe. This impressive mixture of skill and experience also makes her a popular juror for art competitions.
Michele is a true artist, with a deep love of painting and a commitment to her craft. This is your chance to learn from her!
Available in both Streaming and DVD Formats
Introducing Michele Usibelli’s Brand NEW Course: Free & Fearless: Creating Paintings With Energy
In Free & Fearless, Michele will show you her “Fearless Stroke Blueprint” method in detail.
With this approach, your paintings won’t look stiff, overworked, or “corrected to death.”
Instead, they’re going to be much more expressive, full of energy and life!
- How to create a winning composition by planning your painting mentally before the brush ever moves…
- How to ensure your focal area commands attention with the brightest, most saturated color placed first…
- How to establish your darkest darks and connect them throughout the composition to create a powerful value structure…
- How to understand and use color temperature shifts to create dynamic energy within every passage…
- How to understand when and where to use saturated and unsaturated colors to build visual hierarchy that guides the viewer’s eye…
- How to paint complex subjects with architectural elements, perspective, and vanishing points…
- …plus many other incredible lessons!
Michele will also demonstrate specific techniques, like:
- The best way to alter the reference to draw the viewer to the focal point of the painting instead of copying the photograph literally…
- The “negative shape” approach that creates dynamic form with astonishing economy…
- How to keep every color clean and vibrant by adopting one simple brush discipline Michele uses after every single stroke…
- How to quickly simplify a busy scene with foliage and flowers for dramatic and impactful results…
- How to “lead” the viewer through your painting with carefully planned color notes, “like Hansel and Gretel leading a path through the woods”…
- How to manage thin-to-thick paint application so your thickest, most tactile strokes land exactly where they matter most…
- How to enhance the focal point with bold palette-knife application for energy and texture that makes viewers stop and look twice…
- How to guarantee your values are correct by squinting, reading the light, and building the value framework first…
- …and so much more!
This course is perfect for:
✅ Painters who keep correcting, blending, and adjusting, hoping this time it will finally make the painting feel alive…
✅ Anyone whose finished work looks technically competent but somehow flat, safe, and frustratingly “nice”…
✅ Artists who have tried to paint “loose” but ended up with something that just looked sloppy or unfinished…
✅ Painters intimidated by complex compositions with buildings, perspective, and architectural elements who don’t know where to begin…
✅ Anyone who feels trapped by the reference photograph, copying it faithfully but losing every ounce of personal expression along the way…
✅ Artists whose colors keep turning to mud no matter how carefully they think they’re mixing…
You’ll connect immediately with Michele’s bold, passionate teaching style. She explains what she sees and why she’s making each decision as the brush moves. She doesn’t just show you how to apply paint. She shows you how to think before you apply it, telling you what she planned days in advance and why that planning is the reason her paintings look so effortlessly free.
Available in both Streaming and DVD Formats
Chapter Breakdown
Video Length: Approximately 2 Hours
PART 1: Setting the Stage
01 — Introduction
02 — Materials
A wide array of color plus a special selection of neutrals for sophistication. Two brush shapes (bright and filbert), a neutral gray palette for judging value, rubber scrapers for subtractive paint removal, palette knives, a straightedge borrowed from her architecture days, and her approach to cleaning and skin protection.
PART 2: The Demonstration
One painting. A house and flowers from Michele’s own neighborhood. And the discipline to plan every decision before the brush touches the canvas so the finished work looks fearlessly spontaneous.
03 — Preparing to Paint
The painting begins before a single brushstroke. Michele teaches how to use your reference photo as a launching point, not a prison. Set your goals. Plan your design. Get the composition, balance and drawing exactly where you want them. Do not touch paint until you are 100% satisfied.
04 — Lay in Darkest Darks
Squint. Find the light’s direction. Establish the darkest values first because they are the platform that holds everything together. Michele shows how to choose the temperature of your darks, connect them across the canvas, and solve the challenge of painting windows that read as architecture instead of disconnected dark holes.
05 — Establish the Focal Area
This is where your biggest artistic choices happen. Lay in the brightest, most saturated color first, then paint outward from the focal point, comparing every note against it. Michele reveals how she works as a negative shape painter: carving out the background around the subject. Learn to keep color clean by laying the stroke down and leaving it, shift temperatures for dynamic energy, hold the brush back on the handle for expressive marks, and mix from a Master Puddle for color harmony.
06 — Build Out & Carve In
Reshape and re-establish drawing by painting negative shapes around the focal area. Determine background and foreground color notes that support the center of interest. Quick ways to paint foliage and grass without rendering every leaf and blade. And how to keep the viewer’s eye from wandering off the canvas.
07 — Final Touches
Step back and ask: does the painting have a clear focal point? Enhance it with thick palette knife strokes for a tactile feel. Like Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail through the woods, place final color notes that lead the viewer’s eye through the entire painting. Then stop.
BONUSES
High-Speed View of the demonstration painting for your learning convenience
Exhibit of Works: Gallery of Michele Usibelli’s paintings for your creative inspiration
Interview with the Artist: Interview with Michele Usibelli by Eric Rhoads for insights and motivation
High-Speed View of the demonstration painting for your learning convenience
Exhibit of Works: Gallery of Michele Usibelli’s paintings for your creative inspiration
Interview with the Artist: Interview with Michele Usibelli by Eric Rhoads for insights and motivation
What Michele Usibelli Will Share Inside
Free & Fearless: Creating Paintings With Energy
From a quiet neighborhood scene with a house and a riot of flowers ... to a painting that pulses with light and life.
Michele Usibelli does something most oil painting instruction never attempts. Rather than telling you to loosen up, she stands in front of a subject loaded with architectural detail, lush garden color and enough visual information to paralyze any painter ... and shows you exactly how she controls it.
One house. A neighborhood scene near her home, framed by a gorgeous sweep of flowers. Two brush shapes: bright and filbert. A wide palette of color balanced by a special selection of neutrals. No overworking. No going back.
That is what makes this course different. When every stroke is planned before the brush touches the canvas and the palette is organized for clean color from the start, you can finally see which decisions were doing the work all along: where the darks connect, how the focal area commands attention, where edges stay sharp and where they dissolve into garden atmosphere.
There are no individually rendered petals in those flower beds. No brick-by-brick accounting of the house. No photographic fidelity in the foliage.
Discover the Fearless Stroke Blueprint
Most artists work in exactly the wrong order. They open a reference photo and begin rendering detail, hoping the energy arrives somewhere along the way. It never does.
Michele reverses that entirely. The Fearless Stroke Blueprint is the sequence that changes everything: plan with precision, paint with freedom, preserve the energy.
Before touching paint to panel, she spends time planning: studying the reference, making design choices about what to include and what to leave out, getting the composition and drawing exactly right. She does not pick up a loaded brush until she is 100% satisfied with the plan.
Establish the design. Lock in the darkest darks that hold the composition together. Identify the focal point and lay in the most saturated color first. Then build outward, comparing every note against that anchor, painting from the shoulder with loose expressive marks. Finish by placing only the strokes the painting still needs and leaving everything else alone.
Five stages. One painting. A complete system for making bold, expressive work without the fear of ruining what you have already built.
This is why her houses feel solid instead of stiff. Why her flowers feel alive instead of labored? Why her paintings carry an energy that looks spontaneous but is actually the result of an architect’s discipline applied to an impressionist’s eye.
Available in both Streaming and DVD Formats
Learn What Color Temperature Actually Does to Energy. It Is Not What You Assume
Most struggling oil painters are not short on talent. They are short on a system for managing color.
A shadow next to your focal area is not simply “darker.” It shifts in temperature. The relationship between warm light and cool shadow creates the visual vibration that makes a painting feel alive. Colors away from the center of interest are not just less important. They are grayed out, more neutral, deliberately quieter so the saturated notes at the focal point sing.
These are not theories. They are observations from decades of painting informed by Russian Impressionist traditions and the masters who understood that color temperature is the engine of visual energy: Nicolai Fechin, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase.
You will also see why Michele works as a negative shape painter and what that approach unlocks. Instead of rendering every object separately, she focuses on the subject, then carves the background around it. The result is forms that emerge from the canvas with conviction, connected to one another instead of floating in isolation.
Free & Fearless: Creating Paintings With Energy contains firsthand knowledge that only comes from an artist who trained as an architect, studied the Russian Impressionists, and spent a career proving that the boldest paintings begin with the most deliberate plans.
You will want to watch it more than once.
You will want to watch it more than once.
Discover Michele Usibelli’s Fearless Stroke Blueprint in Free & Fearless: Creating Paintings With Energy!
Michele has spent decades painting with the discipline of an architect and the boldness of the Russian Impressionists, learning from masters like Nicolai Fechin, John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase. That accumulated knowledge is what lets her paint canvases that pulse with energy and light without a single overworked stroke, and it is exactly what she hands you in this course.
Leap ahead with a complete start-to-finish demonstration, leaving behind the maze of trial-and-error and incomplete YouTube tutorials.
You have a choice...
Persist in the old way. Render every petal and window frame. Add more detail when the painting feels flat. Use smaller brushes. Blend more.
Go back and fix what you already laid down. And hope the energy arrives on its own...
OR...
Learn the Fearless Stroke Blueprint from an award-winning painter and former architect who has been proving for decades that the boldest paintings begin with the most deliberate plans. Plan the composition. Lock in the darks. Establish the focal area with your most saturated color. Build outward. Then preserve the energy by leaving every confident stroke exactly where you placed it.
30-Day 100% Money-Back Satisfaction Guarantee!
After you go through this course, we want you to be completely satisfied and feel confident that you’ve improved your painting skills.
However, if after watching the video, you decide it’s just not for you, let us know within 30 days of purchase and we’ll refund 100% of your money.
Disclaimer
Results require practice and dedication. The techniques taught in this video need to be studied and implemented consistently to achieve improvement in your paintings. Individual results will vary based on experience level and amount of practice.
Experience The PaintTube Difference!
Enjoy Premium Art Instruction From The World’s Leading Artists
700+ step-by-step video courses so you can build your own custom curriculum and learn from home — at your pace.
PaintTube provides premium art instruction designed to help you learn faster and retain more, delivering Hollywood-quality, professionally produced, high-definition art instruction videos with extreme clarity, excellent sound, and perfect light.
Our painting demonstrations offer you extreme closeups and detail, with a better view than you could get in the first row of an in-person workshop. You’ll have clarity and understanding of each brushstroke, giving you the best art education ever.
FREE U.S. DOMESTIC SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $249 • LIFETIME ACCESS • NO SUBSCRIPTION
To your success!
Eric Rhoads, Publisher
PaintTube.tv
Though you can observe the techniques of any artist instantly by watching them demonstrate and by watching the videos repeatedly, please know that, though many artists offer insights that can help people overcome a lot of learning time, every artist learns at their own speed based on their own level of understanding. Painting and drawing bring great joy, though the joy may come from practicing various techniques over and over until you master them. We do not wish to indicate that you, or anyone, can skip the joy of practice and the challenges of getting better. Painting is a lifetime endeavor, and getting good does not typically happen rapidly, or instantly. Your results may vary. And please know that if at any time within 30 days you feel this video has not lived up to your expectations or its promise, we will happily refund your money.