If you’ve always wanted to get the most out of color and texture in your oil paints, this 5-week, Sunday morning handmade oil workshop with Leonard Yang is for you!

Ever wondered how impasto is made, why certain colors are more saturated than others, what makes paint matte or glossy and how certain paints have a more flowy consistency while others are thick and buttery? 

In this workshop Leonard will break down everything that goes into oil paint. Using various historical to modern day pigments we will explore how these interact with different drying oils, waxes, stabilizers, and fillers. You’d have lots of fun making various pigments into paint using muller and slab which you will learn to tube, store, and save for future use! 

Towards the end of the workshop, we will de-mystify water-mixable oils using a tempera grassa technique. Eventually, you’ll gain the confidence in manipulating paint into behaving the way you want it to, opening up a myriad of ways to work creatively with paint. You’ll be amazed and surprised at the potential that paint has while learning that oil paint is more than just simply pigment ground in oil. We will be working with natural materials, all of which will be provided, without the use of any solvents. You’ll get to bring home tubed paint (20ml) of at least one of each color listed below. 

For safety participants are encouraged to wear dust masks when handling dry powders and pigments 

Weekly Class Plan (each 2.5hrs) 

Week 1

1) Paint History - some notes on types of pigment, mediums (binders), safety, etc. 

2) Your first mull: Finer grinds vs coarser grinds in Linseed Oil and Walnut Oil  

Week 2

3) Make a Sun Thickened Oil

4) Make your own beeswax medium in linseed oil. 

Week 3

5) beeswax and sun thickened oil in paints as stabilizers and extenders 

6) manipulating paint: thick and thin, matte and glossy using waxes and sun thickened oils

7) notes on “fillers” and “extenders” (stearates, mica/silica/chalk powders) 

Week 4: 

8) Creating an oil emulsion with egg yolk (tempera grassa) 

Week 5: 

This week is a roundup of all we have learnt in the previous four weeks, and we can loop back in case we are unable to fully cover all of the topics in the previous four weeks. 

Instructor: Leonard Yang (bio is below) His artwork is here.

Cost: $350.00 Includes all materials

When: Sunday mornings, 10am - 12:30

Dates: 4/12, 4/19, 4/26, 5/3, 5/10

Class size: This class is limited to 6 people

Experience Level : All levels of experience are welcome, you do not need painting experience to take this workshop

Where: The Painting School, 65 Woodhull Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

Leonard Yang bio: Leonard Yang is a Fine Artist, Teaching and Community Artist, and avid road cyclist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Singapore, Leonard’s first solo exhibition was held in New York at the Chinese American Arts Council in 2024. He has held Residencies with the Vermont Studio Center, VT, Millay Arts, NY, and The Alex Brown Foundation, IA, The Goethe Institute and National Gallery of Indonesia, and has exhibited internationally at The Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (ICAS), The Visual Arts Development Association (VADA) Singapore, Dongdaemun Design Center, Korea. Leonard’s work has been featured in various juried exhibitions. His work iscurrently included in the Tappeto Volante Flat File Program, and he has been curated into group shows at Latitude Gallery, Tappeto Volante Gallery, Palladium/Athena Project, Gallery MC, and Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco. His work was published in the ‘I Like your work Podcast’ Spring Catalog 2025.

Leonard is an avid road cyclist and regularly leads bike rides around New York with the New York Cycle Club.

He has biked some 15000 miles across the state of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. His work deeply reflects on this relationship he hascultivated while traversing the landscape on bike.

Leonard’s most recent collaborative project, ‘Roadmap to the Future’ was created during his Teaching Artist Residency with ProjectArt USA in collaboration with his K-12 students, assistants and volunteers at the Glen Oaks Library in Queens, NY, 2024-2025, and exhibited at Voltz Clarke Gallery in 2025.

Leonard has been awarded grants to pursue public projects in Singapore with local arts festival Archifest 2023, and tertiary education institution Republic Polytechnic. Leonard works with community spaces in his neighborhood of Brooklyn, and recently hosted a two person collaborative landscape themed exhibition ‘Daydream Topographies’ at Botanica Grove, a community art space in Bushwick.

Leonard holds an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons, The New School for Design, NY (2019) and a BFA from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (2015).