I started painting with acrylics, mostly abstract textures and colors, in 2020. I’m finally signed up to take art classes in January. But I’ve spent a couple years watching art videos on YouTube–everything from the history of the various art movements, deep-dives into specific artists, and videos simply watching people paint and observing their process.
I’ve made a few notes on things I’ve observed over the last couple of years.
Learn to use primary colors. It’s good to learn to blend colors to understand skin tones, as well as hues, paint/pigment weight, and blending. When I started painting, I bought every color under the sun, and sometimes the same colors from multiple brands, all super heavy paints, and super fast-drying paints. I’ve learned since then that a lot of paint goes a long way, and while I do tend to layer (where fast-drying paint is appropriate), I also think that for blending, or mixing, you want paints that stay wet longer. Learning to blend your own colors, do shading with wetter paints, and experiment with heavy and light paints is a must. Here’s a great video on blending your own colors using mostly primary (or at least standard) colors.
Learn to draw. I think it’s good to know a bit about drawing before you can be expected to be able to paint anything that is representational (i.e. non-abstract). This also helps with necessary pre-planning of a painting. You first want to be able to do at least a rough sketch of what you want to paint before actually putting your brush strokes down.
Understand lighting by first painting from real life. Start with still lifes or pastoral scenes or general cityscapes to start. It helps you understand how the light interacts with the subject. I knew this mostly from photography, as lighting is truly the #1 thing you need to know with regard to photography. But there’s more to learn with painting, where you can actually manipulate where you want the light source to be coming from. You should spend some time playing around with that.
Practice new ideas constantly. I use canvas boards which take up very little space, to test out new ideas before committing them to a full-size canvas. However, even if you screw up a full size canvas, the one great thing about painting is that if something doesn’t work for you, you can paint right over it and start again. (It’s a little harder when there’s texture, but definitely not impossible.)
Watch, Look, Learn. Watch lots of art videos, visit galleries and museums, and take art classes or watch technical videos on certain techniques. I follow many artists on Instagram, and I subscribe to several artists’ newsletters. It keeps you connected to what people are working on. Sometimes that feeds your own inspiration too.
That Infernal Itch 