Patrick Okrasinski

If you’ve ever wanted to learn about plein air painting, check out my Patreon to watch the full process of any of these paintings! Looking back it’s already been ten months, and that means ten different premium painting tutorials. These videos show the full process and my approach to varying subjects, with several camera angles and explaining my thoughts real time. Alongside the monthly painting tutorials there is a lecture series that I’ve started this year and a more personalized, a limited mentorship tier that has been mostly full lately, and more in store for the future! If you ever want to study in person, I teach a limited amount of workshops every year. The full list is always posted on my website. Click the link in my bio to see my Patreon, check my website for future workshops, or sign up to the workshop list to be the first to hear the news about new ones. #pleinairpainting

EXCITING NEWS! I will be having a studio sale of my Europe paintings from last summer later this month, in order to help fund future adventures :) I am selling them personally, and they will all be affordable priced and a great chance to collect a piece of original art from a seminal experience for myself as an artist. Join my mailing list in my bio to stay updated, or shoot me a dm if you’re interested! Cheers

June, Hudson River Fellowship @wethersfieldgarden @grandcentralatelier

A common question I get about my oil painting technique is if I ever glaze? And I tell them no - that I’ve only tried that a few times when back in the studio, and it is absolutely not a tool I use regularly. So I figured it could be fun to try it en plein air. After the first day on this painting I felt it was much too light. I restated the dark background, and for the marble I went in with a dark brown glaze. From what I’ve heard, the trick for glazing is pushing things and then pulling back and pulling away. After removing the excess glaze, it existed only In the small areas between brush marks or canvas weave. I used a simple 50/50 mix of oms and linseed, and that left a nice wet surface that was then really interesting to paint back into. On the second slide, you see some close ups of the folded robes - one of my favorite parts of this painting. The wet surface allowed for some very interesting back and forth between more opaque or transparent paint. I am not sure I’ll be able to do it often, but I liked the effect! Last two images show me working on it for the first day - as a demo for last weekends workshop in Florence. Such a great composition to the photo, thank you @rebeccalucyart for the capture🙌 No more workshops planned for this year. Consider joining the mailing lists for next years, or to not miss the studio sale when the paintings become available! 💁‍♂️

This was the demo from the last day of the workshop in Florence. It was a really fun group - equal amounts of hard work and laughter! This demo helped show the advantages of sight size, and was a deeper dive into pushing the sense of material and refinement in any painting, even something as simple as the steps of a door. I think the rest of the workshops for this year are all sold out. Best way to not miss next years is by joining the mailing list 💁‍♂️🙌

Here’s a timelapse of latest video tutorial posted to my patreon. Some od the topics covered in this portrait of a sugar maple include: Painting Trees at a Middle Distance - When trees are really far away, they easily simplify into a mass of just a few brush marks. And when we are in the thick of foliage, we can be overwhelmed with detailed noise. In this painting the tree is at a middle distance where we can still simplify the large masses, without being overwhelmed by all the detail at first Masking and Simplifying Foliage - The start of the video shows what you really need to look for when painting trees. It’s not about finding all of the tree trunks and branches underneath the foliage, but it’s about the abstract simplification of the largest shapes first Sky Holes and Transparent Foliage - Perhaps the most important aspect of the video is showing an example of foliage where there are a lot of sky holes of different varieties. The secret is to be able to identify even when there are leaves, the transparency between the sky and the foliage colors. Finding the softness, and asking yourself whether what you’re looking at is mostly sky or mostly foliage, or the reverse, is what gives our paintings of trees a feeling of air instead of a feeling of them being paper cut outs Subdividing the Masses - Once you have an accurate block in, even a single color value for the entire trees, you can then cut out the lights and darks, to build the foundation for which the detail eventually finds itself on And as always, there’s a bit of detail, there’s a bit of drawing, there’s a bit of color mixing - and the rest of that good stuff! The reference and finished paintings are also available for anyone wanting to follow along!

A spot just opened up in my workshop in Rome next month, June 4-7th! Head to my site to learn more details! Been enjoying landing in Florence this week. Seeing old friends and currently working with a great group for the Florence workshop! Talking to one of those friends, I think I’ve counted that I’ve only painted 10 times this year. And within the workshop, I’ve noticed I definitely seem to have gotten rusty. OOPS! Anyway, it’s always great to be back in Italy, and I’m looking forward to getting a lot of personal painting time in very soon. Here is a favorite home run from the first time I was in Rome, back in 2023. I’ll probably never be able to paint in that spot again.

People seemed to think my last post was rage bait (it wasn’t) so here’s a portrait that I never shared that I’m actually happy with. Not like it’s the best portrait ever, but it was close to a home run for my current batting average. I tend to not post portrait stuff because it messes with metrics when I go back to sharing plein air work. I don’t have much else to post at the moment anyway, so why not. When I learned to paint, we practiced working on a single portrait for 30 hours. Years later, this one was done in five, and it’s probably better than the ones I could do in 30. I wonder what I could do with that much time now. A big part of growth as an artist comes from knowing how you paint. Not how to, but how YOU. If you’ve only painted a portrait a few times, you don’t really know how you like to paint hair, how you like to fuse shadow edges into the eye brows, how much to push the color, or how much texture you want to use and to what end. For many of these questions, there is no right answer, so we look elsewhere. As a student, you try to answer these questions by listening to your teachers, or copying someone else’s style. But since you’re just mimicking someone else, there’s a lot of uncertainty that comes through. Experience helps us know how we like to paint. We have a goal, and a process, and when things are going good, it’s one step after another until you’re done. But it’s risky. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Growth stems from experimentation and taking risks. The wipe outs are equally important. Also shout out to the great model @nellie.muse (see what I did there?) and @salmagundiclub for always great portrait competition last July. This painting eventually found its way to a great home!

Man I gotta stay in my lane. I actually thought I was off to a good start. But halfway through things felt like they went sideways. I tried squeezing out a ton of lead white on my palette, and challenged myself to use it up. I think the glare from the strong artificial light pointing straight at my canvas made it almost impossible to read the thick brush marks. If I stayed with my comfortable process and used titanium white without crazy texture it probably would have gone a lot better, but if you don’t take some risks, you never learn or grow! Wiped it down to reuse the canvas for a painting worth keeping, because the lessons learned always stay, anyway. Had a fun day at the @lymeacademy portrait comp! Fun seeing some familiar faces and meeting new ones!

It’s been a long week. The studio sale dropped last Saturday. Most of the paintings sold out in the first hour 🙏 since then ive been busy varnish and packing them, while balancing work for the final class of the landscape masterclass (It’s been a really great group of studens!!) These are a few paintings that have not yet sold, check out this and the rest on my website! It closes today! If the painting of the arch from Rome doesn’t sell - I am going to do some wild experiments on it with glazing. I think those colors didn’t quite come out as vibrant as they could have

One of the pieces available this Saturday! On me site. Iykyk

Painting trips with friends are the best thing ever. Last November, I thorough enjoyed a small excursion to Jordan with @pavelsokov and @daanniel.art It was an incredible amount of painting, in one of the most amazing places, packed into 7 days (not including travel) I hope Dan and Pavel forgive me for my choice of pictures, but it is the only one I have from our most memorable meal - our hard earned diner after our first day of painting. Just a little reminder, all the paintings will be available on my website this weekend, and those on the collectors newsletter get early access, as well as some other goodies!