Will Kemp Art School: Structured, Encouraging Painting Instruction for Every Level

Will Kemp Art School is one of the most popular and consistently useful painting instruction channels on YouTube, built around the teaching of a UK-based professional painter who has spent over a decade refining his ability to explain painting clearly, systematically, and encouragingly to students at every level. With more than 700,000 subscribers and over 60 million views, the channel has earned its audience through a combination of genuine teaching skill, practical focus, and the kind of warm, accessible tone that makes beginners feel capable rather than overwhelmed.

Will Kemp is a professional painter who has exhibited his work in galleries in the UK and internationally, and his teaching draws directly on his own practice. He does not teach theory in the abstract. He teaches the specific decisions, techniques, and problem-solving strategies that he uses in his own painting, translated into clear explanations that students can apply immediately. This grounding in actual professional practice gives his instruction an authority and practicality that purely academic teaching often lacks.

What Makes Will Kemp's Teaching Distinctive

The most immediately striking thing about Will Kemp's YouTube channel is how clear and well-structured the instruction is. Each video has a defined focus, a logical progression, and a clear takeaway. There is no padding, no rambling, and no assumption that viewers already know things they might not know. Kemp explains his reasoning as he works, connecting each decision to an underlying principle that students can apply in their own painting.

This clarity is particularly valuable for beginners, who are often overwhelmed by the complexity of painting and unsure where to start or how to progress. Kemp's structured approach gives beginners a clear path through the fundamentals, building confidence and competence step by step. His tone is consistently encouraging without being falsely positive. He acknowledges that painting is difficult, that mistakes are part of the process, and that improvement comes from understanding why things go wrong rather than simply trying harder.

The channel covers three major painting mediums: oil, acrylic, and watercolour. This breadth is unusual among painting instruction channels, most of which focus on a single medium. For students who are exploring which medium suits them best, or who work in multiple mediums, Kemp's channel provides a consistent teaching voice across different materials and techniques.

Colour Mixing: The Core Curriculum

If there is a single subject that defines Will Kemp's teaching, it is colour mixing. Kemp has developed an exceptionally clear and systematic approach to teaching colour that addresses one of the most common frustrations in painting: the gap between the colours you see and the colours you can mix.

His colour mixing instruction covers the limited palette approach, using a small number of carefully chosen pigments to mix a wide range of colours. He explains the logic behind palette selection, the specific mixing strategies for achieving different colour temperatures and values, and the common mistakes that lead to muddy or unconvincing colour. His colour mixing videos are among the most watched on the channel, and for good reason: they address a genuine skill gap that many self-taught painters struggle with for years.

The colour instruction extends into specific applications: mixing convincing skin tones for portrait painting, mixing the subtle greens and earth tones of landscape, achieving the clean, luminous colours of still life painting. Each application demonstrates how the underlying principles of colour mixing play out in specific painting contexts, giving students both the theory and the practical experience to apply it.

The Still Life Curriculum

Still life painting is the backbone of Kemp's teaching curriculum, and for good reason. Still life provides a controlled environment where students can focus on the fundamental challenges of painting, including value, colour, edge quality, and composition, without the additional complexity of working from a moving subject or an outdoor environment. Kemp's still life tutorials are carefully designed to isolate specific skills and build them progressively.

The still life videos range from simple single-object studies suitable for complete beginners to complex multi-object arrangements that challenge intermediate and advanced students. Each tutorial explains not just the technical execution but the compositional thinking behind the setup, the lighting decisions that create the value structure, and the colour relationships that give the painting its visual coherence.

Landscape and Plein Air Painting

Beyond the studio, Kemp's channel includes a substantial body of landscape painting instruction, covering both studio landscape work from reference photographs and plein air painting from observation. The landscape instruction addresses the specific challenges of painting outdoors, including working quickly in changing light, simplifying complex natural subjects, and capturing atmospheric effects convincingly.

His approach to landscape is characterised by the same clarity and structure that defines his still life instruction. He explains how to identify the key value relationships in a landscape, how to simplify complex foliage and sky passages, and how to use colour temperature to create the sense of depth and atmosphere that distinguishes a convincing landscape from a flat, descriptive one.

The Will Kemp Art School Online Platform

Beyond YouTube, Kemp operates a dedicated online school at willkempartschool.com, offering structured courses with more depth and progression than individual YouTube videos can provide. The courses are designed for students who want a more systematic learning experience, with defined modules, practice assignments, and the kind of cumulative skill building that comes from following a structured curriculum rather than watching individual tutorials.

The online school covers oil painting, acrylic painting, and watercolour, with courses at different levels and focused on different subjects. The platform provides a more intimate learning environment than YouTube, with the ability to ask questions, share work, and receive feedback in a community of students who are working through the same material.

Consistency and Reliability

One of the most valuable things about Will Kemp's channel is its consistency. The channel has been producing high-quality content since 2012, and the quality has remained consistently high throughout. Students who discover the channel can trust that the instruction is reliable, that the techniques taught are sound, and that the teaching philosophy is coherent across hundreds of videos.

This consistency matters because learning to paint is a long-term project. Students who find a teacher whose approach resonates with them benefit from being able to follow that teacher's instruction over months and years, building a coherent understanding of painting rather than accumulating disconnected techniques from multiple sources. Will Kemp's channel provides this kind of sustained, coherent instruction in a way that few free resources can match.

The Bottom Line

Will Kemp Art School is one of the most reliable and practically useful painting instruction channels available online. For beginners who want clear, structured guidance through the fundamentals of oil, acrylic, or watercolour painting, and for intermediate painters who want to strengthen specific skills like colour mixing, value control, or still life composition, Kemp's channel provides instruction that is consistently clear, technically sound, and genuinely encouraging. The combination of free YouTube content and a dedicated online school makes it one of the most accessible and comprehensive painting education resources available to self-taught artists.