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Watch Award-Winning Artist Scott Hamill Paint New Zealand’s Towering Southern Alps With One Brush for 90% of the Work — Using "Controlled Omission" to Create Mountains That Actually Breathe!
Award-winning artist Scott Hamill is going to show you how to turn overwhelming mountain scenery into oil paintings full of depth, atmosphere, and energy with a simple reversal of the part most landscape painters get wrong.
It’s the “feel first” order of operations, and it changes everything downstream of it.
Inside Paint Mountains With Energy: A New Zealand Landscape in Oil, Scott demonstrates something most landscape painters have never been shown: the reason a mountain painting feels vast and alive has almost nothing to do with how much detail you put in ... and everything to do with how much you deliberately leave out.
“Don’t paint what the mountain looks like. Paint what the mountain did to you.”
— Scott Hamill
Most painting instruction teaches you to add. Scott teaches you to subtract. And he proves it, by standing in front of a scene so complex it should be impossible to simplify ... and showing you exactly how.
He paints one of the most overwhelming alpine views on earth ... the Dart River valley looking toward Mount Chaos and the Cosmos Peaks in New Zealand’s Southern Alps ... with a single #12 synthetic flat brush for 90 percent of the work. One vista. A limited palette. Bold shapes. No fussy details.
There are no individually rendered rocks on those far peaks. No tree-by-tree accounting of the slopes. No photographic precision in the snow. Scott built this painting from years of painting outdoors in mountain weather, with a New Zealand mentor who spent decades learning to see the Southern Alps as light, temperature, and edge, and from a feeling he chose to protect before the first brushstroke.
Once you’ve watched the full demonstration, you’ll stand in front of your own mountain scenes and see big shapes, value families, and atmosphere ... instead of a thousand details so overwhelming you don’t know where to begin.
What You’ll Discover Inside:
...and so many more insights from a painter whose own life was changed by the landscape he’s teaching you to paint!
Meet Your New Instructor, Scott Hamill!
Born and raised in California, Scott Hamill grew up between the Pacific Ocean and the Sierra Nevada. Surfing. Fishing. Backpacking. Canoeing. He has spent his life in landscapes that move ... water, light, weather, altitude.
But he didn’t become a painter first. He became a physical therapist. A good career. Steady work. The brushes he’d used when he was younger went into a drawer, and the drawer stayed closed for a long time.
He picked up plein air painting seriously at 43. Not as a hobby. As a commitment. What he calls “brush mileage” ... painting the same subjects again and again, outdoors, in real weather, until the hand starts to know things the mind hasn’t caught up with yet.
In 2010, Scott flew to New Zealand to fish for brown trout on the South Island. One afternoon in Glenorchy, a small town at the foot of the Southern Alps, he walked into a gallery. On the walls were large plein air paintings by a New Zealand artist named John Crump. Bold. Fluid. Mountains reduced to clean color, big shapes, and confident brushwork. Nothing overworked. Nothing timid. Every canvas felt like a window left open to cold alpine air.
Scott met Crump. He bought a painting and an instructional video. He flew home. And he pulled out the easel.
He returned to New Zealand. Studied with Crump. Painted alongside him. Learned to see the way Crump saw ... not the inventory of a landscape, but the feeling of it. The weight of the light. The temperature of the distance. The architecture underneath the beauty. And the more he painted outdoors, the more he understood what separates a painting that describes a place from a painting that puts you there: knowing what to leave out.
Today, Scott is an Artist Member and Monterey Chapter Co-Chair of the California Art Club and a Signature Artist Member of the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association. His Redwood Solitude received the Modern Impressionist Award of Excellence at the California Art Club’s 114th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition in 2025, and his Wilder Meadows was selected for the 115th. He was invited to the 2024 and 2026 Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitationals. PleinAir Magazinefeatured his work and his New Zealand connection in “Finding Inspiration on the Other Side of the World” in the February/March 2025 issue. His painting gear fits into a backpack, his palette is deliberately small, and his go-to brush is a single #12 synthetic flat that handles 90 percent of the work.
But what his students tend to mention first isn’t the awards or the gear. It’s that he paints beside you, not above you. He explains what he sees while he’s seeing it. He’s warm, funny, energetic, and specific. And he teaches from the memory of starting late ... not from a pedestal.
Chapter Breakdown
Introduction
Materials
The Approach
Tone & Compose
Lock in the Darks
Paint the Lights
Paint Water & Sky
Take It to Finish
High-Speed View of the demonstration painting for your learning convenience
Exhibit of Works: Gallery of Scott’s paintings set to music for your creative inspiration
Insights from the Artist: Scott’s journey from physical therapy to plein air painting and the New Zealand encounter that changed his direction
