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Learn about Mike's approach and what to expect
Watch Mike scout locations, set up his easel, and paint three complete plein air studies at Vasquez Rocks using acrylic gouache.
Mike Hernandez spends a full day painting at Vasquez Rocks in southern California. Across 12 episodes, he scouts locations, works through compositional problems, and completes three studies in acrylic gouache on toned paper.
The course follows the real outdoor painting process: reading light and atmosphere, simplifying busy landscapes into shapes and color relationships, and making decisions as conditions change. Mike paints through high noon light, overcast skies, and shifting clouds. Filmed on location, unscripted.
Easel setup, brush selection, and acrylic gouache for outdoor painting
Mike scouts the location, covers his Maestro easel setup and brush preferences for thick gouache, and introduces acrylic gouache, including what makes it behave differently from regular gouache and why he uses it outdoors.
Thumbnail sketch, atmospheric perspective, and painting at high noon
Mike does a fast pencil lay-in and explains why too much detail at this stage slows down the painting and works against the loose, broad approach he wants to maintain.
Mike establishes sky, distant hills, and rock working background to foreground, covering atmospheric perspective, why shadows contain blue, and what makes high noon light difficult to paint well.
Mike refines shadow planes on the rocks and adds bush highlights, including his rule for color saturation: smaller shapes can carry more of it, larger shapes need to share a common mother color.
Mike wraps up the first study with neutral gray bushes, warm foreground accents, and cast shadow refinements, showing how warm, cool, and neutral color each play a role in holding a painting together.
Competing masses, depth through value, and committing to a lighting decision
Mike finds his second composition and sketches through the problem of two similarly sized rock masses, working out how to push and pull their shapes so one reads as clearly dominant.
Mike blocks in sky, rocks, and foreground shrubs with an emphasis on big shapes, covering the relationship between foreground detail and background simplification and why adding more to a distant rock makes it read as smaller, not larger.
Mike develops rock highlights and color accents, and works on connecting scattered shadow shapes, explaining why disconnected shadows make a composition feel busy and how grouping them creates calm and structure.
Mike puts the entire foreground into shadow to let the sunlit rock formation carry the painting. The lighting wasn't in front of him, so he walks through the process of committing to a decision and making it convincing.
Mike finalizes the second painting by enlarging key shadow shapes, introducing geometric contrast into the tree forms to break up the organic softness, and peels the tape for the reveal.
Deep perspective, atmospheric color, and working fast with big brushes
Mike lays in the third composition with a quick thumbnail, then blocks in sky, distant mountains, the main rock, and broad green masses, treating the whole scene as a set of averaged color notes before adding any variation.
Mike finishes the final study and talks about why fast, small outdoor paintings like these are where most of the real learning happens, and how they feed the larger studio work that follows.
Mike Hernandez is a renowned plein air artist and Hollywood art director known for his mastery of bold compositions and harmonious color palettes. With a background in animation and a passion for capturing the essence of nature, he inspires artists to explore dynamic landscapes through traditional and digital mediums.
