Painting Brush Strokes with Soul and Story
Coming Soon
Painting Brush Strokes with Soul and Story
A Beginner‑Friendly Gouache Course in Narrative Painting
Releasing early 2027
Painting Brush Strokes with Soul and Story is an invitation to slow down, notice more, and paint with emotional clarity. This course teaches you how to see like an artist — not by chasing accuracy, but by building a relationship with light, value, colour, gesture, and story.
Designed for complete beginners, the lessons move gently and intentionally. You’ll learn foundational gouache techniques alongside a deeper way of seeing: noticing shape before detail, understanding value as emotional structure, using light as narrative, and painting the human figure through presence rather than perfection.
Instead of illustrating a scene, you’ll learn how to create the conditions where story can be felt — through mood, restraint, atmosphere, and the quiet conversation between subjects. You’ll discover how simple, soulful brushstrokes can hold meaning, memory, and emotional truth.
By the end of the course, you’ll have created a final narrative painting and learned how to paint the held moments where belonging and restoration take root — even if you’ve never painted before.
No prior painting or drawing experience is needed. Just curiosity, gentleness, and a willingness to see differently.
Lifetime access to the complete beginner‑friendly gouache course
Lifetime access to the complete beginner‑friendly gouache course
Gouache Foundations
Learn the essential basics of gouache — how to mix, layer, soften, and rework paint with confidence. You’ll understand how gouache behaves on paper so you can build skills gently, step by step, creating the quiet foundation for expressive, narrative work.
Brushstrokes with Soul
Explore expressive, intentional brushwork that carries emotion and presence. You’ll learn how gesture, rhythm, and mark‑making shape the feeling of a painting — how a single brushstroke can hold meaning, memory, and the quiet energy of a held moment.
Light and Contrast
Discover how light and shadow guide the viewer’s eye and create meaning. You’ll learn to simplify values, work from strong references, and use contrast to build depth, atmosphere, and quiet narrative tension — letting light become a visual expression of insight and restoration.
Story in Paint
Learn how story emerges through colour, symbolism, composition, and restraint — without needing to explain anything literally. You’ll create paintings that hold emotional threads, invite imagination, and reveal the subtle places where belonging and restoration take root.
Lifetime access to the complete beginner‑friendly gouache course
Lifetime access to the complete beginner‑friendly gouache course
A Note from Wendy
Wendy Shipman
The MakeHer Studio
I’m Wendy — an artist, writer, and qualified coach, and the founder of The MakeHer Studio. I live on New Zealand’s Kāpiti Coast, where the rhythm of the sea and the changing light often find their way into my work.
Through both my coaching and my art practice, I’ve come to understand creativity as a place of relationship — a quiet meeting point where story, memory, faith, and reflection take root. Painting has never been about perfection for me, but about presence: learning to slow down, notice more, and trust the gentle work unfolding on the page.
I created Painting Brush Strokes with Soul and Story for those who feel drawn to painting but aren’t sure where to begin, or who long for a thoughtful, supported creative practice. As a coach, I hold space for people to start gently and without pressure — and this course is an extension of that same care, offered through paint, light, and the quiet held moments where story begins to emerge.