From one artist’s dream to a shared home

Last year, I finally brought one of my dreams to life: creating The Art Digger Studio, a community of fellow artists. It’s a shared space where we learn, explore, and grow together. Since then, the community has been steadily expanding, and I’m proud to have such wonderful artists with us. I’m grateful for their insights and for the enthusiasm they bring to each monthly challenge and investigation. To give you a sense of what the community is like, I’d love to share a summary of the monthly content we’ve created so far.

This is not a traditional academic curriculum, far from it. Instead, it’s a sequence of inspiring challenges that explore different aspects of the artistic journey and are informed by the teachings of the great instructors I’ve had the honor of hosting over the years. The focus is on helping you improve your skills, learn to think and see like an artist, and develop your own personal style.

Every month, we share video presentations and demos, downloadable PDFs, and curated sources of inspiration.

We’ve also hosted live Q&A sessions with masters such as Mark Dunford, Edmond Praybe, Alex Kanevsky, and Ruprecht von Kaufmann. All recordings are permanently available to community members.

If you’d like to join us, you can find all the details here: The Art Digger Studio Membership

The Year at The Art Digger Studio, Month by Month

March 2025:

  • Sketch Drawing: Practice focuses on analytical drawing, an essential skill that can elevate your artistic toolkit.
  • Know Your Colors: A deeper exploration of color, focusing on the subtle nuances of pigment characteristics and mixing, including the study of color triads.

April 2025:

  • Brush Drawing: Practice that bridges the gap between drawing and painting, training gesture and flow
  • Mylar Versatility: An in-depth explanation of Mylar as a support for drawing and painting, with proposed exercises.

May 2025:

  • Picture Plane, Grid & Geometry: Understanding the importance of the picture plane, and exploring compositional relationships.
  • Practice Notan: Applying this knowledge to Notan compositions with suggested practices.

June 2025:

  • Transferring Drawing to Canvas: Exploring various methods to transfer your drawing or sketch accurately onto canvas.
  • Painting with Carbon Transfer: Using carbon transfer to move back and forth between abstraction and accurate depiction of form.

July 2025:

  • Painting Continuum Spectrum: Exploring the continuum of artistic intention in contemporary painting practice.
  • Where Are You as a Painter?: Locating your artistic voice within the Painting Continuum

August 2025

  • Painting with Line Drawing: Using an approach that interplays between painting freely with color shapes and then superimposing drawing with paint.
  • A Giacometti Portrait: A visit to the famous book by James Lord, discussing Giacometti’s artistic process and his use of line.

September 2025

  • Color Matching Practice: A powerful exercise to improve your ability to see and mix colors accurately.
  • A Watercolor Reset: A watercolor practice to train spontaneity, decision-making, and lightness of touch.

October 2025

  • The Two-Layering Process: Exploring a process similar to that used by the painter Felipe Alonso. The concept is based on working in distinct stages: draft and composition, Support preparation, infra-painting, and supra-painting.

November 2025

  • Creating Your Own Support: Developing the ability to design and build supports tailored to your artistic intent.
  • Two Textured Paintings: Applying what you’ve learned by creating and painting on two different types of textured supports.

December 2025

  • Working with Dibond: An in-depth exploration of Dibond, arguably one of the best contemporary supports for painting. We will study the material, its properties, its many possibilities, and how to prepare it in practice.
  • Live Demo: Creating Your Dibond Support.

January 2026

  • Mastering Color Shifts 1: Studying the process of mastering subtle color shifts within a shape through a focused exercise, copying master paintings by Euan Uglow.

February 2026

  • Mastering Color Shifts 2: Working from a classical painting of your choice in which the color shifts are blended in a subtle, atmospheric way. Your task is to identify the hidden transitions and translate them into broken, visible color planes instead of simply copying the blending.

March 2026

  • Mastering Color Shifts 3:  Taking things further by working from life. We’ll set up a still life under carefully controlled conditions to make the exercise as helpful as possible in developing your painter’s eye.

April 2026

  • Exploring the Poetic in Painting: Considering the relationship between poetry and painting, and what makes a painting poetic, trivial, or merely decorative.
  • A Morandi Approach: Entering Morandi’s realm of intimacy, honesty, and sincerity, and exploring the meditative, emotional atmosphere of his work. We work inspired by Morandi, not to imitate his style, but to learn from his attitude and his consciously accepted constraints.

A way of Working

Taken on its own, each month offers a meaningful exploration of key perspectives on the artistic endeavor. But together, they become something more essential: a continuous way of working. This is a practice grounded not in quick results, but in the gradual refinement of your perception, your painter’s eye, sustained by regular practice and energized by new content each month.

Invitation

If this way of working resonates with you, I would love to have you join us inside The Art Digger Studio.

The Art Digger Studio Membership