Meet Charlie Easton, a committed painter who works in various media but particularly loves acrylics for their versatility, practicality, and immediate impact. Charlie introduces his approach to acrylic landscapes and previews what you’ll learn in this comprehensive course. Discover how his process will help you achieve your painting dreams, translating that moment when you look at a scene and think, “I want to paint this!” into a successful, powerful landscape that tells your unique story.

Discover Charlie’s transformative P.R.O. mindset — Process-driven, Resilient, and Open — that will fundamentally change how you approach your paintings. Charlie demonstrates how releasing tension and stress creates more fluidity and enjoyment in your painting process, ultimately resulting in better artwork. Learn why technical skill alone isn’t enough and how adopting this professional mindset creates the perfect foundation for artistic growth. This simple mental framework has students saying, “Charlie has changed the way I think about my art.”

Explore the CRUX of Charlie’s painting process — his revolutionary 5-question framework that applies to all mediums. This simple yet profound system helps you identify what truly matters in any scene and gives you absolute clarity about what to paint. You’ll discover how these 5 questions could lead you to creating your BEST work yet. The last question is particularly empowering, as it helps you remove overwhelm and focus only on the essential elements that create powerful, focused landscapes. This section is a MUST-WATCH for artists of all levels and mediums!

Delve into six essential concepts that help you answer “What’s actually happening in the scene?” Charlie guides you through understanding form (”Everything Is an Egg”), linear perspective (“Everything Is a Box”), aerial perspective using his “Box of Distance” concept, shape identification, shape relationships, and how reference differs from reality. Learn Charlie’s unique approach to perspective that makes viewers feel part of the scene rather than mere observers. This technical foundation gives you the tools to translate a three-dimensional reality into a compelling two-dimensional painting with confidence and authenticity.

Explore the unique properties of acrylic paint that allow for both oil-like application and watercolor transparency. Charlie shares essential tips for working successfully with acrylics, including how to keep your paint moist, the importance of using plenty of paint to maximize wet-on-wet techniques, proper paint disposal considerations, and the value of consistency in your setup. These practical insights create the perfect technical foundation for the painting demonstrations to follow, helping you make the most of this versatile medium.

Watch as Charlie applies his 5-question framework to the reference photo for his studio demonstration. See how he identifies his focal point (sunlight breaking through trees), explores how the scene makes him feel (uplifted, euphoric), analyzes what’s happening (perspective, form, atmospheric effects), plans what to include to tell his story, and decides what to leave out. This practical application of theory demonstrates how these questions create a clear roadmap for your painting process, helping you develop your unique artistic voice and style through thoughtful observation.

Begin painting with Charlie as he establishes the distant elements of his forest scene. Learn valuable techniques, including colored underpainting for unification, establishing compositional movement, working wet-into-wet, applying veils to enhance light effects, and creating soft edges in distant planes. Discover how to scumble color over dry layers to create shimmer and how to “imply detail” rather than painting every element. Charlie demonstrates how to vignette the scene and apply highlights and darks to create a sense of atmosphere and depth in the distance, setting the stage for the foreground elements.

Move into the middle-ground and foreground areas as Charlie creates dimensional space through warmer, darker colors and more angular tree forms. Learn how to maintain consistency with your distant elements while adding gestural marks that support your painting’s story. Discover Charlie’s technique for creating “bounce lines” that guide viewers through the composition like a pinball, and how to accurately represent reflected light. This chapter emphasizes the importance of keeping your painting’s emotional message (in this case, “uplifting”) at the forefront of your technical decisions.

Develop layers and learn how to add detail that enhances rather than distracts from your focal area. Charlie demonstrates how to handle acrylics’ tendency to dry darker, how to establish movement from darkness to light, and how to apply the “egg” concept when creating form in foliage. Discover why capturing the feeling of your scene matters more than exact replication, and learn techniques for creating depth through overlapping and unifying elements with glazes that reduce visual “jumpiness” in your foreground elements.

Learn the crucial skill of stepping back, assessing your work, and making thoughtful adjustments. Charlie demonstrates how to develop warm and cool relationships, add complexity without distraction, and maintain focus on your painting’s central message. Discover how ongoing critiques help you stay true to your focal point and how glazing techniques can enhance your vignette effect and lead the eye toward the light. These refinement techniques help you maintain control of your composition while building richness and depth.

Complete your painting with Charlie’s insightful approach to final assessment and adjustments. Learn how framing your work can help you see what needs attention, and watch as Charlie uses chalk to identify areas requiring refinement. Discover how to make adjustments without sacrificing the spontaneity and joy of your original marks — knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing what to change. Charlie shares how acrylic’s quick-drying nature eliminates the need for a mahl stick and helps you determine when your painting truly feels right.

Why NOT KNOWING your subject can actually get you more in tune with the place, and how to look at your location freshly with the eyes of a visitor if you are more familiar. Charlie gives you tips on how to understand a place more than just by the 2d shapes it has, “When you have a physical reaction to a place it's always a good sign!”

Use the 5 Questions we discussed earlier in the studio to identify what’s most important about this place and what’s actually happening in the scene so that you can have a plan for what to paint. Identify what you love about it and how it makes you feel, what you can leave in or out to tell the story you want. Learn tips to help you stay on track as you paint.

In this step, Charlie will “key in the painting” — putting in lightest lights and darkest darks to understand the range of values we will be working with in this scene. You’ll also learn how to manage acrylics in a hot, dry environment — working fast and keeping them wet is key. A common misconception is that acrylic isn’t a very fluid medium, but you’ll learn how to set aside that notion to create beautiful wet-into-wet passages. As you cover the surface with paint, you’ll pick up tips on edges, atmospheric shifts, color temperature, value changes, brushwork and more!

Build color and make adjustments at this stage to make your painting FEEL like the subject you are trying to paint. Create depth and reverberation in the water with a veil of color to bring out the reflection of the sky. Use wet-on-dry, scumbling, and wet-into-wet painting to bring out the focal point and refine shapes, values, and edges throughout the painting. Learn how to work quickly and become good at self-critique.

Not one to feel a painting has to be completed on site, Charlie brings the plein air painting back to the studio to assess and make final adjustments that will bring it to a finish, in keeping with the original intent.