Fall back in love with painting in...
The painting practice that brings back the magic of painting
Every Month
Paint along
Every month we go live and paint something new. Playing with new ideas, and finding new ways to have fun with paint!
Make it yours
Take the monthly challenge, experiment, and build your creative habit: Building a practice of your very own.
Share it
Post to the gallery, share your process + see what everyone made. Share your work with a group who is on the same page as you!
Fall back in love with art again... and again... and again!
It's amazing what happens when painting becomes part of your routine.
The paintings you finish. You develop your own style. And you stay connected with your creativity.
That's why Gouache Studio isn's a course you finish.
its an ongoing studio practice.
A space built around the real work of painting: showing up, exploring, and remembering why you fell in love with painting in the first place.
A student of mine, Rachel, decided to turn her hobby into an intentional practice, and with community + instruction made an AMAZING transformation with her art! Have a look at this...
Brighten your colours and loosen your brush strokes... its about to get real
Heres what your month looks like
- Join us live on the third Thursday of every month at 9am Pacific Time (US) to paint together and explore new ideas in gouache. We are here to have fun! Recorded in case you can't be there
- Monthly Challenge: Each month we leave the studio with a fresh perspective and a challenge in hand. Something tangible to put into practice.
- Share your work in the Studio Gallery: a shared space to showcase what your are working on and get inspiration from other artists.
- Be part of a thriving community of artists -> paint alongside people who are here for the same reasons you are. To find joy in painting.
Hi, I'm Justin
I'm a full-time traveling artist living out of a camper with my family, chasing light through national parks, and getting absolutely covered in gouache on a regular basis.
Plein Air Magazine called me a Breakthrough Artist of the Year. My kids call me "Dad, stop painting, dinner's ready."
For the last six years I've taught thousands of students through eight-week online courses, and I loved every minute of it. But I kept noticing something. Students would finish the course, get excited, send me a few paintings... and then go quiet.
Not because they stopped loving art.
Because there was nowhere left to go.
No one waiting for them. No monthly spark to keep the fire lit. No community saying "hey, show us what you made."
I've made that mistake myself, treating painting like a skill to acquire rather than a joy to return to over and over again. I spent years chasing the "right" technique, the "right" style, the "right" level of finished-ness before I could share anything.
You know what that got me? A lot of lonely hours and a pile of paintings I was weirdly reluctant to show anyone.
The thing that changed everything wasn't a new course. It was the people I started painting alongside.
Join Gouache Studio TODAY!
to get FOUNDERS pricing
"Yes, you can cancel any time," and answers to the questions people actually ask me
FAQ
Because this isn't a course.
A course has a finish line, and the moment you fall behind it starts to feel like homework you owe somebody. The Studio doesn't work that way. Each month is complete on its own. Miss July entirely, come back in August, and you haven't lost your place—there is no place to lose.
The only thing that carries over is the habit.
This is the most common thing people tell me, and yes.
Most plateaus aren't a skill problem. They're a repetition problem—painting the same subject the same way because it's the thing you know you can pull off. The monthly challenge exists to push you sideways into something you wouldn't have picked, which is usually where the movement happens.
If what you want is a structured curriculum that walks you up a ladder, the Gouache Course is the better fit. If you want a reason to keep painting things you haven't painted before, that's this.
The demo runs about an hour and it's recorded, so you can watch it in pieces at 6am or on your phone in a parking lot. The challenge is yours to scale. some members give it a single 20-minute sitting at the kitchen table, some spend a few hours across the month.
There's no minimum. Nobody's tracking your attendance.
Most of it. Your eye transfers completely. everything you know about value, composition, and edges comes with you.
What doesn't transfer is your hand. Gouache reactivates when you go back into it, and it dries at a different value than it looks wet. Watercolor painters tend to use too much water. Acrylic painters expect layers to lock down and they don't. Digital painters miss undo.
None of that takes long to unlearn. It just takes reps, which is the whole point of showing up monthly.
The Gouache Course is a structured curriculum built for technical mastery: Building from the ground up. You complete it and you have a foundation.
Gouache Studio is what happens after. It's built for momentum: a new demo, a new challenge, and a room full of people painting alongside you, every month, indefinitely.
Plenty of people do both. Course to build the skills, Studio to keep using them. If you're choosing one and you're brand new, start with the Course.
It'll help, though I want to be straight with you about how.
The Studio isn't a technical curriculum, it's a monthly demo where you watch me mix and solve a painting in real time, which is honestly where most people finally see why their color goes chalky. Usually it's too much water, too much white, or reaching for a tube color instead of mixing toward it.
If color is the specific thing standing between you and paintings you like, the Gouache Course covers it systematically. The Studio will show it to you over and over until it clicks.
Fewer than you'd think, but better than you'd think.
You don't need a large palette or a wall of brushes. But I'd push you toward artist-grade paint and cotton paper, because cheap materials make gouache behave unpredictably: the paint dries somewhere you didn't intend, the paper buckles or pills, and you end up believing the problem is you.
It isn't. Solid materials mean the paint does what you asked it to, and then you can actually learn from what happens.
Beyond that: a few brushes, a palette, water, and something to sit on.
After each demo I give you a prompt to take into your own work. It's different every month: sometimes a subject, sometimes a constraint, sometimes a way of working you'd never choose on your own.
Then you post it in the Studio Gallery, finished or not, and see the same prompt solved fifteen other ways. That part is usually worth more than the demo itself.
No. Plenty of members lurk for months before they post anything.
That said, the people who share are the ones who stick around, and the ones who share unfinished work stick around longest.