Make Believe
Strange ideas to finished oil paintings
For the artist (even a beginner) who's never touched a brush before but has a weird, wonderful idea stuck in their head, this turns it into a finished oil painting you're actually proud to hang.
What Type of Surreal Oil Painter Are You?
Take this short quiz to discover your creative archetype and learn how to transform your strange ideas into convincing, realistic oil paintings.
Meet your instructor
Hey, I'm amberskyealcock.
For years I painted exactly what I saw. A bowl of fruit. A nice tree. Technically fine, emotionally dead.
The weird ideas were always there though. Little private stories in my head that felt too strange to put on a canvas. So I didn't. I kept them in sketchbooks nobody saw and painted the safe, boring thing instead.
What changed everything was realising realism isn't the opposite of strange. It's the thing that makes strange believable. Once I actually learned glazing, sfumato, grisaille, properly, patiently, the weird stuff stopped looking like a doodle and started looking like it meant something.
I teach the way I wish someone had taught me. No pretending the ugly stage doesn't exist. No shame about liking odd little symbolic animal paintings. I’ll help you build the technical foundation to bring the images in your head to life, so they look as convincing as they feel.
Hear it from the source
What my people say about my art
about the course
Make Believe:
Strange ideas to finished oil paintings
The course has 8 modules and over 7 hours of learning and practicing, including full length painting tutorials from start to finish. Pause it, replay it, argue with it, whatever you need. It works for teens, adults and anyone else with strange ideas, and there's no explicit content in sight. In this course, you'll learn the tools, the workflow and the decisions I actually use in my own studio, from the first spark of "what if a chihuahua ended up on the Raft of the Medusa" to a finished piece.
Your future skills
Build your painting skills with confidence
Developing ideas you actually want to paint
Learn how I generate and develop ideas, work from fragments and references, and turn seemingly unrelated images into something with its own visual logic.
You stop fearing the ugly stage
No more abandoning a painting halfway because it looks rough and wrong. You'll recognise the ugly stage for what it is: a normal, temporary part of the process, and keep going anyway.
Smashing the visual language of symbolism
People can read the visual arts without training of any kind, even if they think they ‘know nothing about art.’ While art is highly subjective, there is also something deeper and more instinctual about how the human eye looks at images. You will learn to wield the visual tool of symbolism.
Lets get in touch
Have any inquiries? Contact me using the form bellow
