ZincBlue began with a question that had followed its founder, painter, educator and Courtauld doctoral scholar Martin Kinnear, through more than twenty years of teaching: why do paintings that look completely different so often run into the same problems?

Across thousands of critiques, courses, classes and studio conversations, the patterns kept recurring. Painters might work figuratively or abstractly, tightly or loosely, in oils, watercolour or mixed media, but they were often wrestling with the same underlying questions: colour, value, composition, saturation, temperature, emphasis, sequence and how to turn a complex creative task into a series of useful decisions.

Over his time at the Royal College of Art, Martin organised those recurring problems, teaching methods and decision points into a matrix. He called it Zinc. Zinc could look beneath the surface of very different paintings, recognise structural similarities and identify what might help a work move forward. It captured not a particular style of painting, but a way of thinking about painting.

Then advances in AI made something much more radical possible.

For generations, painting tuition has been organised around the course, the class or the tutorial. Artists choose something that looks relevant, adapt themselves to its subject and timetable, or search through books and online tutorials hoping to find the answer to the problem in front of them.

Martin realised that the most relevant teaching material was already sitting on the painter’s easel.

So he created Blue: an AI layer that allows Zinc to work directly with a painter’s own images, references, ambitions and works in progress. Blue turns Zinc’s analysis into clear, practical mentoring in the way Martin teaches in the studio: step by step, stage by stage, with advice that can be acted on immediately.

The result is ZincBlue: a new model for painting education in which the work itself becomes the curriculum. It can see what you are making, understand what you are trying to achieve, identify what could make the work stronger, and build bespoke guidance around both your painting and the works that inspire you.

Instead of finding the right course for your painting, ZincBlue builds the right course from your painting.