ZincBlue is a new kind of painting mentoring. Instead of taking a fixed course, you bring the work you are making and ZincBlue builds the mentoring you need from the lessons in your work. Your painting, your aims and your way of working become your bespoke program.

Yes. ZincBlue works with oils, watercolours, acrylics and gouache, across a wide range of styles and subjects. You can also set your preferred palette, technique and materials, so the mentoring adapts to how you actually paint, including mixed media or choices such as not using black.

Almost every part of developing a painting, including composition, colour, value, temperature, saturation, materials, technique, blocking in and deciding what to do next. It can also help you compare different stages of a work or understand why a painting is not yet doing what you want it to do.

Smartphone, tablet or desktop. And because you can talk to it as well as type, the way you use it can mirror the way you like to work.

At your easel, Blue works as a voice mentor, so you can keep painting while you think out loud.

On a smartphone, it's there when you're looking at a painting and want to understand how it works.

At a desktop, there's room to sit with your images and plan properly — which is where Studiobooks are at their best.

Who created ZincBlue?

ZincBlue was created by artist and educator Martin Kinnear, drawing on more than twenty years of professional painting, teaching and mentoring.

Its foundations grew from Martin’s research into how paintings work: how painters use colour, value, composition and materials, and how those decisions shape the development of a painting. The system was developed through his work at the Royal College of Art and subsequently alongside his doctoral research at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

ZincBlue brings that knowledge together as practical, painter to painter guidance designed to help artists make more informed decisions in the studio.

No, ZincBlue is not free . ZincBlue is designed to give you something much closer to bespoke painting tuition and mentoring than a library of generic lessons.

Professional one to one art mentoring in the UK commonly costs around £80 - £150 an hour, with personalised painting tuition often around £60 - £100+ per hour. ZincBlue gives you personalised guidance built around your painting, your medium and what you want to achieve, whenever you need it, for a fraction of that cost.

Of course, there is an enormous amount of free painting content on YouTube and elsewhere. But free information isn’t necessarily free learning. You still have to find the right advice, decide whether it applies to your work, adapt it to your particular problem and discover through trial and error what actually works. That costs time, paint, canvas and sometimes quite a lot of frustration.

ZincBlue starts with the painting in front of you. Instead of asking you to search for the right lesson, it builds the lesson around what you actually need to do next.

That’s where the cost saving is.

ZincBlue is currently in beta, so you cant join just yet - but join the waitlist and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s open.