I Flew to France to Learn Painting in 10 Days (From My Mom)

February 19, 2026 · 22 min · 151 views

Three oil paintings in ten days, with zero prior experience. A still life of four fruits, a Nightmare Gundam that nearly ended the whole thing, and a big Eevee for my son, which my mom and he picked as the final piece. I painted all of it in my parents' garage in France, at about 5 degrees Celsius, because I didn't want the whole family breathing oil paint fumes over Christmas.

The deal with my mom

My mom is a genuinely talented artist. She's been painting and sculpting for years. There are canvases all over the house and more stacked in the attic. Me, I write code for a living. Over the past year I tried woodworking, electronics, 3D modeling and 3D printing on this channel, and none of it moved the needle with her. So I took the fight to her turf.

The rules: at least three paintings in ten days, she picks the last subject, and if she's not impressed on day 10, I build her whatever she wants. She's mentioned a new table more than once. We don't own the tools to make one in France.

Dead nature

Day 1 produced a legendary stick man, then a very brown still life, which in French is literally called a "nature morte", dead nature.

My first drawing of the fruits was way too big and had to be erased. The banana sparked a family debate about its alignment. Everyone called my apple a tomato. My mom never did like the lemon leaf.

The Gundam

Then day 4 happened. After the still life I thought I could paint anything, so I went after the Nightmare Gundam. At that scale every edge and every color shift mattered, and I didn't have the control for it. My whole family had opinions. I had my first artist breakdown, stopped caring, and woke up on day 5 wanting to quit. Eevee is what pulled me back.

The cold didn't help. By day 8 my hands were blocks of ice, so I moved to a freed-up bedroom to finish.

Learning to paint

I learned it from the ground up. Underpainting with yellow ochre and burnt umber thinned with turpentine, then blocking in colors with medium, then shading and details. The grid trick to scale a reference onto the canvas, which made the Eevee drawing work on the first try.

The hardest part by far was picking and mixing colors. The easiest, surprisingly, was shading and blending straight on the canvas. That's the nice thing about oil paint: it dries slowly, so you can mix right on the canvas.

Eevee

I spent three hours on Eevee's eyes alone and redid chunks of day 9. On day 10 I went full French mode and painted for nearly ten hours. My favorite bit is the tail, the one part where I stopped copying the reference.

I started this purely to impress my mom, and I didn't expect to end up enjoying it as much as I did. I might do more.

The ten days in numbers

12 hour flight
10 days
3 paintings
About 5 degrees Celsius in the garage
Nearly 10 hours of painting on the final day

Watch it

Watch the full build on YouTube.

Gear and links

Tutorials I enjoyed:

Recording gear (affiliate links, no extra cost to you):