Have you always dreamed of creating your own paintings but felt overwhelmed by where to even begin? You’re not alone! Many aspiring artists are captivated by the world of color, composition, and creative expression, yet feel lost in the sea of information about color theory and design principles.
If you’re eager to Learn How To Paint in a way that’s fun, fast, and accessible, you’ve come to the right place. Consider this your comprehensive guide, breaking down essential painting tips that will set you on the path to artistic fulfillment, no matter your chosen medium.
These painting tips are universally applicable, whether you’re drawn to the rich textures of oil, the fluidity of gouache, or the soft strokes of pastel. The core principles of art and design are consistent across all visual art forms. Think of these principles as the fundamental building blocks—the ABCs of painting. Once you grasp them, you can confidently apply them to any medium you desire.
And speaking of diving right in, if oil painting is calling your name, be sure to grab our QuickStart Guide to Oil Painting. It’s packed with photos and easy-to-follow steps designed to get you started oil painting the right way, quickly!
Here are the best tips to guide your journey in learning how to paint:
1. Choose the Art Medium That Excites You
There’s a common misconception that beginners should start with watercolors and gradually progress to more “difficult” mediums like oil painting. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Let’s debunk this myth: There’s no prescribed order for learning to paint! You have the freedom to begin with whichever paint ignites your passion.
All paints share the same foundation: pigment, which is the essence of color. What differentiates paints are the binders—the materials mixed with pigment that alter their appearance and behavior.
Our #DumaDoArtTip for beginner painters: Start with the medium that excites you most! Follow your heart and curiosity.
When you begin with what you love, you cultivate an art practice that you’re genuinely passionate about.
Exploring Different Art Mediums: Quick Insights
- Watercolor: Known for its luminous washes and delicate transparency, watercolor relies on controlling the flow of water. It’s water-based, making cleanup easy. However, its transparent nature and unforgiving quality (mistakes are hard to correct) can be challenging for beginners.
- Gouache: Often described as “opaque watercolor,” gouache is thicker and allows for covering mistakes. It shares a similar application process with acrylic, oil, and pastels, starting with darks and progressing to lights.
- Acrylic: Acrylics are known for their rapid drying time, ideal for layering but less so for blending. Being water-based, they offer relatively easy cleanup before they dry permanently into a durable, slightly flatter finish than oil.
- Pastel: Pastels offer vibrant colors straight from the stick, eliminating the need for mixing colors. However, this necessitates a larger initial investment as you’ll need a separate pastel stick for each color. Some pastel artists amass collections of thousands of sticks!
- Oil: Oil paints are celebrated for their rich, vibrant colors that remain glossy and retain brushstrokes even when dry. Their slow drying time is a boon for blending and making corrections without pressure. Many artists find oil painting surprisingly forgiving and easy to work with due to its blendability and correction capabilities.
Each medium has its own unique charm and appeal. Eventually, you’ll likely want to explore them all.
As we often tell our students, “You won’t know until you try.” Many painters work across multiple mediums, drawn to the distinctive qualities each offers.
Starting with your preferred medium not only makes learning more enjoyable but also provides inherent motivation. This is key to fostering a love for painting and consistently showing up at your easel, which is the surest path to improvement.
2. Invest in Good Quality Paints and Supplies (Canvas Can Be Budget-Friendly)
Using good quality paints is crucial because budget or student-grade paints can hinder your ability to mix vibrant and nuanced colors, leading to frustration. Stick with reputable brand names.
Paint brands typically offer two grades: student and artist.
Artist-grade paints are more expensive but contain higher concentrations of superior pigments, resulting in richer, more vibrant colors.
Student-grade paints, designed for beginners, are perfectly adequate for starting out.
#DumaDoArtTip: Purchase the best quality paints you can afford without causing financial stress or paint anxiety.
Beginners benefit from using plenty of paint and painting frequently! We want to foster a relaxed, exploratory approach, encouraging you to give yourself permission to create even “bad” paintings.
This mindset accelerates learning and enhances enjoyment, making you more likely to stick with painting long-term.
If artist-grade paints are within your budget, they will certainly offer more vibrant colors. However, student-grade paints are a great starting point. You can even mix student and artist grades as you progress and gradually upgrade your palette with artist-grade colors.
Canvas Choices for Oil and Acrylic Painters
While quality paints are essential, beginners in oil and acrylic painting don’t need to invest in professional-grade canvases immediately. High-quality canvases are built for archival longevity. In the early stages of learning, the focus is on practice and development, not museum-quality preservation.
Beginners need to paint A LOT. Mastery comes from quantity and consistent practice. Therefore, opting for inexpensive, smaller canvas panels is ideal. Even dollar store canvas panels work perfectly. They are pre-primed and ready to use immediately.
#DumaDoArtTip: For those starting with oil paints, explore our recommended oil painting supplies for beginners.
Paper Quality for Watercolor, Gouache, and Pastel
For water-based mediums like watercolor and gouache, and for pastels, paper quality becomes more significant. The paper’s absorbency directly affects how water-based paints behave and impacts the final artwork. We recommend starting with 140-pound watercolor paper. It’s sturdy enough to handle light layering and scrubbing without excessive buckling.
Watercolor is often considered one of the most challenging mediums due to its unforgiving nature. Stock up on student-grade or beginner watercolor papers from reputable brands and reserve expensive cotton rag papers for later as your skills develop. Again, quantity of practice is key for beginners.
Paper Considerations for Pastel Artists
If you’re working with pastels—yes, pastels are indeed paints!—paper choice is quite important. Pastel paper needs “tooth,” a textured surface that allows pastel particles to adhere. Many pastel artists prefer sanded papers, which feel like sandpaper and offer excellent grip.
While you can start practicing pastels on regular paper, layering will be limited. Many pastel artists begin with a watercolor underpainting to build depth, then layer pastels on top.
Another surface favored by pastel artists is watercolor paper prepared with a layer of fine pumice acrylic medium or clear gesso. These gritty surfaces enhance pastel adhesion and are worth experimenting with. The best way to find your preference? Try them out!
3. Train Your Eye to See Shapes
If music is the art of listening, painting is fundamentally the art of seeing!
As visual artists, our primary task is learning to truly see. And what painters need to see above all else are shapes.
This is why painting is accessible even to those who believe they “can’t draw.” Traditional drawing often focuses on contour lines, but seeing shapes is a different way of perceiving the visual world.
Deconstructing Objects into Shapes
Everything around us can be simplified into basic shapes:
- A house: a square.
- A window: a rectangle.
- A tree trunk: a cylinder.
- A face: an oval.
- A mountain: a triangle.
- A person: a collection of shapes.
The human body, with its multitude of shapes, is one of the most complex subjects to paint. Hands are notoriously difficult to draw! So, don’t be discouraged if your initial attempts look a bit “wonky.”
#DumaDoArtTip: We recommend beginners start with landscapes. Identifying shapes in landscapes is often easier, and you can achieve satisfying results even if your drawing isn’t perfectly precise.
#DumaDoArtTip: A practical approach to starting a painting is to break down the scene into 5-7 large shapes. Then, further subdivide each of those into 5-7 smaller shapes. Details are added last.
Here’s a helpful easy drawing exercise for painters that will help you develop your shape-seeing skills.
4. Grasp the Basics of Composition
Composition is the art of arranging shapes on your canvas or paper to create a pleasing design. It’s also a powerful tool for guiding the viewer’s eye through your painting, creating a visual journey.
Mastering composition is the quickest way to elevate your paintings from looking amateurish to polished and engaging.
We owe much of our understanding of composition to the ancient Greeks, who developed the Golden Ratio, a precise mathematical formula for aesthetically pleasing arrangements.
A simpler, highly effective adaptation of this principle is the rule of thirds. It’s easy to use and requires no math!
Applying the Rule of Thirds for Beautiful Compositions
Many beginners instinctively place their main subject directly in the center of the canvas, perhaps due to an early learned emphasis on symmetry. However, off-center placement is usually far more visually appealing and dynamic. It adds a sense of movement to your artwork.
To use the rule of thirds:
- Imagine or lightly draw a tic-tac-toe grid on your canvas, dividing it into 9 equal rectangles.
- Position your focal point—the main subject you want viewers to notice first—at one of the intersections where the grid lines meet.
- Avoid placing your horizon line directly in the middle of your painting. Instead, place it along one of the horizontal lines of your tic-tac-toe grid.
The painting below effectively demonstrates the rule of thirds in practice.
This is a solid foundation in composition for any beginner. Now, practice and experiment to see how the rule of thirds can transform your paintings!
5. Begin with a Limited Color Palette
You don’t need a vast collection of paint tubes to create stunning paintings. In fact, using only a few carefully selected colors, known as a limited palette, can prevent your paintings from becoming visually chaotic. Using a limited palette to mix a wide range of colors is the key to achieving harmonious and unified paintings.
The Split Primary Color Palette
Our favorite limited palette is the split primary palette. With this palette, you can mix virtually any color you need.
This popular palette includes warm and cool versions of the three primary colors, plus white:
- Cool Yellow, Cool Red, and Cool Blue
- Warm Yellow, Warm Red, and Warm Blue
- Titanium White
Understanding Warm and Cool Colors
Color temperature refers to the perceived warmth or coolness of a color.
- Cool colors include lemon yellow, icy blue, and minty green. These colors are often associated with shadows, early morning light, or overcast days.
- Warm colors include sunflower yellow, fiery red, and tropical blue. Use warm colors for subjects bathed in sunlight or illuminated by late afternoon sun.
Juxtaposing warm and cool colors creates striking and dynamic color combinations.
The painting below, depicting fog lifting in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, showcases warm colors that vividly pop against the cool tones of the fog.
After establishing your core 6-color palette, you can consider adding a few supplementary colors:
- Purple or magenta can be useful additions, as they can be challenging to mix reliably.
- Phthalo or viridian green are great for landscapes, especially in verdant environments, offering a wider range of green variations.
- Yellow ochre is excellent for sunny highlights and toning canvases.
- Browns can also be used for toning canvases. Mixing brown with ultramarine blue creates a rich black, potentially eliminating the need for black paint.
That’s it! If you want to delve deeper into using a limited palette, explore our detailed blog post here.
6. Learn Basic Color Theory
Yes, color theory is important, but you don’t need a physics degree in light to start painting. In fact, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever need to know the complete physics of light to paint effectively. And this comes from someone with a background in teaching about light at a science museum!
In our experience, too much theory at the beginning of your painting journey is often counterproductive.
- It’s often overwhelming and difficult for beginners to absorb.
- It can dampen initial enthusiasm. Most beginners are eager to paint, not attend lectures on art theory!
#DumaDoArtTip: A basic understanding of color theory is all you need to start experimenting and learning to see and mix colors. Practical experience is where true learning happens. This is also why painting small is beneficial—you complete more paintings quickly, accelerating your learning.
Color Mixing Fundamentals
We advise beginner students to start mixing colors just like they did in kindergarten.
The three primary colors are:
- Yellow
- Blue
- Red
Mixing these primary colors creates the secondary colors:
Blue + Yellow = Green
Yellow + Red = Orange
Red + Blue = Purple
With just these colors, you have a full spectrum to begin exploring!
Remember, the quality of your paints impacts color mixing. Higher quality paints yield cleaner, more vibrant mixes.
When mixing, focus on careful observation and try to match the colors you see as closely as possible. Pigments vary in their properties, leading to different mixing outcomes. The more you practice, the better you’ll become at color mixing and understanding your preferred pigments.
Understanding Complementary Colors
To advance your color mastery, learn about complementary colors—pairs that sit opposite each other on the color wheel:
- Blue and Orange
- Yellow and Purple
- Green and Red
Complementary colors possess remarkable properties:
- Mixing complementary colors together neutralizes them, reducing saturation while maintaining harmony. This is invaluable for creating variations in value (lightness or darkness) and painting elements that recede into the background.
- Complementary mixes can also create blacks and grays.
- When placed side-by-side, complementary colors create visual vibrancy and contrast, ideal for drawing attention to focal points in your painting.
This is more than enough color theory to get you started. Experiment with these principles until you feel comfortable.
7. Train Your Eye to See Values
Here’s a common saying in art schools and art communities:
“Values do all the work, but color gets all the credit.”
Often, when a painting feels “off,” the issue lies in the values, not the colors themselves.
Values refer to the lightness and darkness of a color, ranging from nearly white to almost black, with a spectrum of shades in between. Imagine a grayscale with about 8 steps between pure white and pure black.
Many beginner painters don’t utilize enough values in their paintings, resulting in flat, cartoonish-looking works (as seen in the left example in the image above). Images with a broader range of values (right example) appear more dimensional and realistic.
Values can be deceptive because color can trick the eye.
To better discern values, convert your reference photo to black and white using a photo editor. This eliminates color distractions and allows you to clearly see light and dark relationships.
#DumaDoArtTip: A quick way to check your values is to step away from your painting for a short break—30 minutes or even a day. Returning with fresh eyes often reveals value discrepancies more readily.
8. Learn a Basic Painting Process
For many beginners, understanding the painting process itself is the most challenging aspect. Many instructors, often due to “expert blindness,” overlook the beginner’s need for structured steps, having forgotten what it’s like to start from scratch.
This is why we developed the Duma Do 10-step process specifically for beginner oil painters. It provides a clear, sequential guide, eliminating guesswork and uncertainty.
The Duma Do 10-step process for creating fine art paintings is detailed in our QuickStart Guide to Oil Painting. Simply subscribe to download it instantly.
While this guide is tailored for oil painting, the underlying process is adaptable to acrylic, gouache, and pastel. For watercolor, simply reverse the order, starting with light washes and progressing to dark values.
And now for our best #DumaDoArtTip:
Have you always been intrigued by oil painting? Then…
…You’ll Love Our Intro to Oil Painting Course
Learn genuine fine art oil painting in an engaging and accelerated manner, through mini paintings and manageable steps. Our students are amazed by their rapid progress and how enjoyable it is to develop their own art practice.
Learn More and Enroll in our Intro to Oil Painting Course
9. Embrace Painting Small and Often
Switching to mini paintings was a game-changer in our own artistic journey. It’s how we learned to paint quickly and got our work into galleries within just over two years.
Here’s why painting small is so effective: A large painting takes significantly longer to complete than a drawing. A 24″x24″ painting can require at least 7 hours of work! If the results are discouraging, it’s easy to lose momentum and abandon your painting practice prematurely.
Painting small offers numerous advantages:
- Quicker Completion: Mini paintings can be finished in a fraction of the time. A 5″x7″ piece might take only an hour or two. The more paintings you complete, the faster you learn. Mastery is built on quantity and repetition.
- Economical and Efficient Learning: Large canvases can be expensive, leading to hesitation and fear of “ruining” them. Small 5″x7″ canvas panels are very affordable, often costing around a dollar each.
- Encourages Experimentation: Painting small removes pressure and encourages you to try new tools, techniques, and exercises. You’ll take more creative risks, explore more freely, and grasp fine art principles more rapidly.
Best of all, everything you learn on a small scale is directly transferable to larger paintings—the principles of art remain the same!
So, stock up on 5″x7″ or 8″x8″ canvas panels and make painting small and often a core part of your learning process!
Explore 25 more compelling reasons why painting mini paintings makes big sense.
10. Keep it Playful!
Play is the most effective learning strategy, regardless of age.
“Play is a strategy for learning at any age.”
Mara Krechevsky, Project Zero researcher
This is why we advise against overwhelming beginners with excessive theory upfront.
Too much theory can stifle excitement and delay the hands-on experience of painting. Beginners are eager to dive into the paint and experiment, and excessive theory can feel like an unnecessary barrier.
Furthermore, abstract theories often don’t resonate until you have some practical experience with paints, tools, and processes.
Instead, beginners should start painting as soon as possible to begin playing and experimenting directly.
This playful, experiential approach is central to our oil painting for beginners course and how we structure our classes.
Embrace your curiosity and excitement. This is how you cultivate a painting practice you’ll truly love, stay motivated, and continually explore and develop your unique artistic style.
11. Just Keep Showing Up
The good news is that small, consistent steps will lead to significant progress over time!
Cultivate the habit of showing up regularly and taking small, consistent actions. These efforts compound, leading to remarkable results.
When starting a new habit, make it as easy as possible—so small that it’s almost impossible to say no.
Try a 1-2 minute sketch each day. Yes, you can create a drawing in just a minute! Making it this easy helps overcome initial resistance and allows you to ease into the habit without feeling overwhelmed.
Once this daily drawing becomes routine, add one painting session per week.
If you commit to showing up every day and aim for just 1% improvement each day, you’ll be 37 times better at the end of a year. This principle is highlighted by James Clear in his bestseller, Atomic Habits.
To help you stay on track, here’s our Duma Do Roadmap to Mastery!
And that’s it!
This is more than enough to get any beginner painter started. Now, go get your paints and PLAY! It’s incredibly fun.
Click to watch a time-lapse of a mini painting session.
- Painting on 5″ x 5″ watercolor paper prepared with two coats of gesso and toned with yellow ochre paint. The painting process took about 1.5 hours.
- A limited color palette was used.
- Notice at 1:18 how corrections are made to the dark values that were initially lost.
Now, Grab Your Paints and PLAY!
P.S. If you have more questions about learning how to paint, please ask them in the comments below, and we’ll be sure to answer!
