Having now done an entire five paintings (six, actually, but I got a bit lazy at the end of the sixth and it needs some touching up before I can post it here), I am clearly a super-expert and absolutely qualified to give other people advice. If you've been thinking, Hey, this painting lark looks sort of fun, here's what I've learnt so far.


Painting Advice for the Absolute Beginner (from the Absolute Beginner)


To start with, a few basics about the paint itself. I've been using acrylics, so I can't really speak with An Entire Six Paintings authority on any other type. The advantage of acrylics: they dry very quickly, so your paintings aren't in danger from, for example, your silly cats rubbing themselves all over them. (Oil paints can take days to dry.) The disadvantage of acrylics: they dry very quickly. You've mixed the perfect colour, but ten minutes later you find it's already dried onto your palette and you're going to have to add water, diluting the colour, before you can reuse it.

My first painting was a bit of a patchy mess (and the colours were a little too intense) because I didn't realise you could dilute acrylics. Dilute your paint! It's okay! It'll make it spread more easily, and it'll often be essential for getting the specific colour you're aiming for. (Diluting the paint is just a matter of dabbing your paintbrush in the water and then mixing the paint on your palette with the wet paintbrush.) The more you dilute it, of course, the more the layer beneath will show through, so there might be times you need to use more concentrated paint.

You don't need that much paint. Just blob a little bit onto your palette. You can always add more later, whereas you can't really get unused paint back in the tube.

(Don't worry if you don't actually have a palette. There's a reason it just looks like a fancy spelling of 'plate'.)


Be aware, before you start work on a painting, of how things are layered and the order you'll have to paint them in. If a scene includes both sky and mountains, you have to paint the sky before the mountains, because the mountains overlap the sky. This may sound obvious, but my instincts yell JUST GO STRAIGHT TO THE MOST STRIKING FEATURE IN THE IMAGE, so it was something I had to learn! If you paint the mountains first, you'll end up trying to paint the sky as close to the mountains as possible without actually overlapping them; it's fiddly and it won't look natural.

A problem I have is that I tend to get impatient and move on to the next layer before I've finished adding detail to the one behind it. For example: I paint the sky, and then I paint the mountains. That's fine; the mountains are in front of the sky, so that's the correct order. But wait: I haven't painted the clouds yet! If I'd painted the clouds before the mountains, some of them could have gone behind the mountains, but now I'm just going to have to conspicuously avoid the mountains when I'm painting the clouds.

I have had a 'curses, I should have detailed this bit earlier!' moment on every single non-Bob-Ross painting I've done. (When you're following along with Bob Ross, of course, it's hard to do things in the wrong order.) Perhaps the most obvious example is in the Welsh cliff painting, where you can very easily tell that I painted the cliff before trying to paint the waves behind it, resulting in waves that awkwardly hover just above the cliff.


There will be a point in every painting where you go, 'Oh, no, this looks terrible. Should I bother carrying on?'

Carry on. Painting isn't like writing. If you're writing a story, you'll probably have an idea by halfway through of whether it's working; even if it's unfinished, you'll be able to say, 'Yes, I'm happy with what I've got so far,' or, 'Hmm, I'm not sure about this.' Unfinished stories can be good! Unfinished paintings do not look good. If an unfinished story looks bad, it probably needs heavy reworking. If an unfinished painting looks bad, that's normal, and you just have to keep going until it comes together.

Again, using the Welsh cliff as an example, there was a point where the painting looked a lot like this:


I was very tempted to give up, because, as someone who's more used to writing, I tend to think 'if what I have so far doesn't look good, I must have gone wrong somewhere.' Don't give up!

If you're trying to reproduce a picture, don't worry too much about getting everything exactly the same (unless you're working as a forger, I suppose). You don't need a perfect duplicate; the original already exists. Simplify things if you need to; attempt your own techniques to get the feeling of an image across without copying it exactly. Don't obsess too much over small details, and painting will be a lot more relaxing.



I have no idea whether any of you actually have any use for these tips, but, er, here they are!