May I make a suggestion about the Paint-o-grams . One minute might be a bit short to see the whole painting evolve. I found the pace was so fast that it was difficult to follow the intermediate steps. I think you have a great concept but the total time taken may need a bit more consideration.

(RG note) Thanks, Max. Quite a few expressed this concern. We're working on ways to slow things down without becoming a bore. Keep in mind that the viewer can hit the pause button at any time. Another frequently asked question was, "How long did the paintings actually take?" We know this exactly, because the camera took a picture every five seconds. The one looking south at the house next door took one hour and six minutes, the crashing waves one took forty-four minutes. I fiddled with them both for a few minutes after getting them into the studio.

A secret is something hidden that cannot be readily seen, and yet is
watercolor painting woven into our reality and we know it. When we view a painting, technique and composition are apparent. What we come away with is the secret of the artist, which is how their feeling permeates the painting. Therefore, may I suggest to add Feel to the beginning of the process of "think, plan and do." How you feel about your subject is going to come out as you "do" your painting.

The addition of feeling changes the object viewed to the subject experienced. Think, plan and do will then all be incorporated into your overall subjective experience of the present moment. When you are in the zone, you are expressing your total connection with your subject, which is your feeling in a sub-conscious state. But your conscious feeling will add color and depth to the process and awareness of your incorporating the inside and outside into your painting. And surely this is the ultimate reason we paint.

Painting as a matter of think, plan, do, is YOUR way of working. Dark Stallion
acrylic painting on canvas
54 x 64 inches Many of us are intuitive and don't plan our paintings, but discover them. In fact, for me, the work I try to plan usually fails, because the energy motivating it is not fresh enough to bring my best solutions.

I loved your video idea! (And it seemed a love letter from your son.) Mandy 3
underwater photograph It's so instructive to be able to actually see how painters process and solve visual information from eyes to canvas. I noticed you didn't even do a sketch - just started filling up the blank canvas.

(RG note) Thanks, Jolene. Yep, no drawing, just looking around for patches that eventually go together to form things. It's not the only way, but it's one way.

I have no idea what you mean by "negative areas" and what do you mean when you say "painted topically"?

(RG note) Thanks, Richard. Negative areas are those areas that can be painted around positive areas--often foreground objects. I look for elements that are in some way in silhouette, and can be "held" by either a dark or a light surround. The way to accomplish this is to "overshoot" and "cut in"—that is to paint beyond the proposed edge, and cut back to it with the negative patch. "Painted topically" is where elements do not easily lend themselves to this process, and must be painted in positive fashion and on top of other elements.

I think your one minute paint-o-grams are a brilliant idea. I especially like the lack of VO (voice over); the silence allows you to focus on what's happening on the canvas. These could fill an important instructional gap, particularly for the intermediate-level painter. Most material of this nature tries to be all things to all painters; yours starts with the assumption that a certain level has already been achieved. For me, they provide snapshot reminders of the basics which I often tend to forget, such as empty space, blocking out, et al. Put some together and offer a CD.

Your "thinking" stage of painting is one that I have employed also. Amaryllis
oil painting
40 x 40 inches As I almost always work in my studio with still life and floral set ups, I have the luxury of setting up, planning, and "thinking" about the plan of attack. Often I sleep on it, visualize colors and flow of light, choose focus points all the while "painting the scene in my minds eye" before putting a stroke to canvas. Prior to learning this technique, I felt lost and confused waiting for my muse that rarely appeared out of the blue.

In regards to your 2-minute video, I use Corel Painter . Wonder in Aliceland
digital painting
15 x 24 inches It mimics natural media paints and tools and goes beyond. One of the things the program does is it can record your painting session and you can save the recording and export it in a number of formats creating a quick video of your piece being created. It also sometimes serves as a great animation tool. When I sell a final printed (one-of-a-kind) image to a customer, I often offer the video of the piece being created. A similar thing can also be done in Photoshop.

I think that the Paint-o-gram is great idea, partly because I had Classic Features
pastel painting on paper
20 x 16 inches already thought of it and am working on producing a few. The format is enjoyable, even the "background" music which I usually hate. I find myself wishing that these pieces were examples that are an ongoing part of a more in-depth production comprised of several longer (say five to ten minute pieces) that include some commentary regarding various aspects of creating a painting. I realize that part of the beauty and value of these short pieces is that they are easy to create, minimally intrusive, and do not have the baggage of expected pedagogy; for that reason they should be kept as is, just occasionally throw out a bit of off-the-cuff discourse and close-up of brush technique in a longer piece.

Two additional ideas:

1) If these can be made available at "better than u-tube" quality (like use a DivX codec) for those of us who have the ability to receive and appreciate such, please do. Maybe accessible via your website.

2) Create an exchange listing to encourage your readers to create their own paint-o-grams for sharing. The process of creating and viewing my stuff this way has helped clarify my awareness of process and (hopefully) improved my results.

(RG note) Thanks, Dave. We're working on improving quality by switching from single frame on a digital camera to video. Also, regarding your last suggestion, we would certainly be interested in looking at any paint-o-grams that might come our way.

As a film designer, I was lecturing at the American Film Institute here in Los Angeles on the subject of Design for Film and focusing on camera position and movement. Here are a few thoughts just off the top of my head. I know all of the below contradicts your theme "over the artist's shoulder" but it may give you something interesting to cut away to and break up the monotony of the single point of view.

1. In the early stages of the clip when you are laying out broad brush strokes try painting on a piece of glass with the camera shooting through your brush strokes up into the artists face.

2. I would love to see a full frame of your brush at work on your palette, swishing mixing and creating the color palette for the work in question.

3. If tricky is the theme for the moment try a reflection shot into your glasses showing the reflection of your brush at work on the painting.

4. I am not sure the entire piece should be kept at the same frame rate. The speed and length of the piece is fine for a short clip but I crave a little more "dwelling time" at key moments in the progress of your work.

5. I also crave cutting to some close-up shots of the brush hitting the canvas with passion and color exploding onto the scene.

Did Badly Drawn Boy grant you permission to use Our Town
art print
18 x 24 inches their delightful music in your video? Because I looked all around for some sort of artist acknowledgment or permission statement on both your newsletter and the YouTube site where the video was posted and could not find any wordage indicating the name of the band or of the song, "I Love NYE." As an artist, writer and publisher, I am pretty touchy about copyright issues and intellectual property and even talk a bit about this in the writing workshops that I do with children because they so easily pull from their life of popular culture when they begin to create something.

If you did not get permission to use this music in your film, it is copyright infringement, plain and simple. If you did get permission, I think you should post an acknowledgment that indicates this. One might argue that "everyone is doing it," I suppose, but I believe that as a professional artist, and I speak for myself here, it is important to play by the rules in all cases of copyright. By the way, I have found an easy solution for my own video work at freeplayMusic.com , where they outline pretty specifically who can use their clips for free. The music is definitely not as cool, but it's not too bad and it's legal.

(RG note) Thanks, Dar. No, we do not have permission. There were only a few tunes available in our iPods while we were in Hawaii, and that one seemed the most suitable. It's a temporary track, I assure you. We have now purchased the rights to an extensive collection of carefully timed Baroque music that will be inserted into these and future efforts.

I have been making videos of how my pieces come together for about six or seven years now. When we do shows, we always show a long version that loops continuously in a DVD player. My web-site contains a shortened 2 minute version of our most recent real-time painting movie. I have found that my clients (and my parents!) love having access to these films. They feel closer to what it is I am attempting. When asked about my pieces, they can go online and show them as close to first hand as possible what my painting entails. It's a great way to broaden the experience my clients have with what I create.

Thank you for sharing these videos! I'm a fiber artist, not a painter, but I learned so much from seeing your approach. Just watching you work, start to finish, without all the explanations, was marvelously informative. It has strongly influenced my understanding of how to compose and set up any art piece I might do. Regarding a title for them, I thought of a bird sitting on your shoulder, then of Archimedes, Merlin's owl. So I would call this "Archimedes' View."

(RG note) Thanks, Vicki. Yours was the first letter to come in, about ten minutes after the letter started sending on Thursday night. By the time the letters were finished on Friday morning we had more than a thousand suggestions for titles to these video clips. And of course they're still coming in. Thank you to everyone. Here are a few: Brushups, Livewires, See-Quentials, SpeedScape, pictogram, pictograph, Time Flash, paintcast, iPaintings, Gennesis, Genn-assist videos, Genn-gram, Gen-o-gram, Art Force One, Painter's View, Over the shoulder, Over my shoulder, Painting at a glance, Visual Painting, With my paintbrush, In my shoes. Painting Flashbacks, Paint-egram, One Minute Master, Genn-a-side, Paint Spots, All in Good Time, Flash-Bobs, Paintogramoramadingdong, Shoulder-shots, Shoulder clip, quick clip, paint flicks, flash painting; flash art; art in a flash, expedited art adventure, quick pace painting; speed painting clip, painting in rapid mode, quick painting clip, painting in a clip, Quickies, Gennies, Bobbers, The Master's Touch, At One With Landscape, Zingbangs, Brushzingers, Bob-tubes, Bobangles, Painterblips. Painterpoops, painterbits, paintangles, paint-a-minute. Minute-Miracle, Minuteman, Mini-mite, Mini-pic, and Paint-A-Doozy.

An Inconvenient Truth is one of the greatest hoaxes to survive because the so-called "liberal arts" have no, zero, nada, training in any science. Nor do they even understand the basis of the scientific process. Instead, they leap upon everything with emotions that cloud any idea of perceptive thought. Al Gore is very clever at deluding the masses, as evidenced by his delusion that he "really won" in Florida. Now he is rousing the audiences with his own delusions of his "truth." For heavens sake, pick your heroes better! The truth of the matter is that the weather of the planet earth has gone through many cycles, and the past transition from tropical hot to cold to hot to cold to warmer is simply continuing. It may cause great inconvenience, and even suffering and disaster, but to believe that man is causing it is ludicrous. It is symptomatic of the ego of Al Gore that he would think that he could cause such an impact.