Skip Whitcomb on Ranch Roots, Mentors, and a Lifetime of Painting the West

Skip Whitcomb grew up on a cattle-and-horse ranch in Eastern Colorado, where the open land and big skies became his lifelong subject — and later his spiritual home as a painter. In this episode, Skip joins Kari and Lisa to share how a college drawing class pushed him toward art, how mentor Ned Jacob got him outdoors with nothing but a paintbrush and Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting, and why he's never once painted outdoors in pastel despite building many of his finished pastels from oil field studies. Plus, the love-hate tug-of-war between oil and pastel on any given piece, the limited-palette color-harmony method at the heart of his year-long mentoring program, and his sage advice for every painter: get your values right, because "values do all the work and color gets the credit."