apply-plein-air-painting

apply-plein-air-painting is a skill for Claude Code from jeffreytse/grimoire-core. It costs 43 tokens per session (1,406 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for painting outdoors from observation, starting with the main light and dark shapes before adding color and detail.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan and complete a plein air study—a painting made outside at the subject's location—within a limited session.
Why use it?
Outdoor light changes while you work, which can make a painting inconsistent. This approach helps preserve the scene's lighting as conditions shift.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the grimoire-art plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to plan and complete a plein air study—a painting made outside at the subject's location—within a limited session.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-plein-air-painting
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jeffreytse/grimoire-core --skill apply-plein-air-painting
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffreytse/grimoire-core

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install grimoire-art, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for apply-plein-air-painting

README.md
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Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-plein-air-painting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-plein-air-painting/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for apply-plein-air-painting

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-plein-air-painting"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-plein-air-painting.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,406 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00043 $0.01406
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00703
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00281
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00141

Measured 12d ago against content hash d76378ca4ec3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apply-plein-air-painting scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/art/painting/skills/apply-plein-air-painting/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apply Plein Air Painting

Paint on location by establishing a light-locked value structure in the first 20 minutes, then working color temperature and detail into that structure before conditions change — producing a complete study in 1–3 hours.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Plein air painting was codified by the French Impressionists (Monet, Pissarro, Sisley) and elevated by the Barbizon school as the foundational training method for landscape painters. Plein Air Painters of America, Outdoor Painters Society, and every major representational painting program require plein air studies as core curriculum. Leading workshops (Cape Cod School of Art, Scottsdale Art School) structure entire curricula around outdoor location painting. Why best: Light and atmosphere shift continuously outdoors, so a workflow that locks the value structure first and defers detail is the only approach that reliably survives changing conditions — chasing detail before values are set guarantees a painting with mismatched light by the time it's finished. Impact: Monet's plein air studies produced his signature understanding of shifting light quality — an understanding impossible to develop from reference photos, which flatten color temperature shifts. The core discipline of plein air painting — commit to a value structure before light changes, work fast, prioritize large shapes over detail — transfers directly to studio painting speed and decision-making. Artists trained exclusively in studio often produce static, artificial light; plein air forces observation of transient atmospheric conditions.

Steps

1. Set up efficiently — target under 10 minutes

Light changes every 20–30 minutes; slow setup wastes valuable time when light quality is optimal.

Equipment:

  • Pochade box or French easel
  • Limited palette (see Step 2)
  • Panels, not canvas (panels are rigid; wind doesn't buckle them)
  • Viewfinder or value finder (red filter to check values)

Site selection:

  • Find your composition before unpacking — walk 3–5 viewpoints, choose the strongest
  • Position easel with back to primary light source; avoid painting into direct sun
  • Set up in shade where possible (ambient light reads values more accurately than full sun in your eyes)

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 96 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A d76378ca4ec3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apply-plein-air-painting is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffreytse/grimoire-core (4 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 1,406 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.