(T) Painting

Quick-drying but just as versatile as oil paint, acrylics are the most common paint for amateurs and professional painters alike. Water-based, acrylic paints are easy to use and widely available at craft stores and specialty art shops, perfect for use with intricate details and abstract masterpieces. They're much less expensive than oil paints, but no less professional.

• Acrylic paints most regularly are sold in tubes, like oil paint, and can be mixed on a palette with simple water to thin out and mix to create new colors. Because it dries very quickly, it's the perfect paint to layer, creating base tones to create depth and detail in landscapes, portraits, or other pictures.

The most versatile, professional, and vibrant paints available are oil paints. They're also the most expensive and take the longest time to dry, but offer all kinds of advanced mixing techniques and layering options for professional painters. It might not be the best place to start, but it's something to consider for the future, or to experiment with if you're looking for a challenge.

• Oil paint is also frequently sold in water-soluble bricks, which can be worked similarly to watercolor, and can be somewhat quicker-drying than traditional tube oil paints. Get a variety of primary colors and learn to mix your own shades to cut down on the cost.
• Unless you want to glob the oil paint right from the tube onto the canvas in thick, visceral blobs like the impasto paintings of de Kooning (awesome looking, yes, but super-expensive), in addition to the paint itself, you'll also need to get some solvent to use as a paint thinner.
• If you paint with oil paints, you need to prime the surface first with basic acrylic primer, otherwise the paint will eventually destroy the canvas or paper. Any surface the paint touches, the palette or the mixing board, likewise should be primed to extend its life.

Who ever said you needed to buy paint? Using berries, tea-emulsions, or even ashes on your canvas are all perfectly appropriate methods, depending on the picture you want to create.

• Food-based paints can change over time (or rot, depending on how you want to look at it). This can give your picture a time-based element, changing over the days and weeks after you finish it. Document your egg-paint before it starts to stink and throw it out in time, or acrylic-paint over it to keep it finished.

Depending on the kind of paint you end up choosing for painting your picture, you'll need to get brushes appropriate to work with it.

• Use rounded-tip brushes for water-color painting. Flat-tip synthetic brushes are best for acrylic paints, while filbert-tip brushes are best for oil paints. You can experiment with different brush fibers, picking something that's appropriate for your price range.

While it's not a required step--you could always just start painting--it's helpful to sketch out the basic shape of the subject to use as a guide. If you want to paint a pot of flowers, you don't have to get into the tiny details of the pollen in the center, but it's a good idea to have the basic outline of the petals on the paper before you start adding color.

• Use contour lines to sketch the basic shape, and gestural lines to start getting a sense of the spatial relationship between the objects in the subject. The object will be made up of many little shapes, like many little paintings. Try to focus on the relationship between things.
• Locate the source of the line illuminating your subject and start looking at how the shade is cast upon the subject, and how you'll need to capture it with color and line.

On your palette, spend some time mixing your paints and trying to get the kind of colors you want to use to capture your subject. Some painters will be really concerned with getting the value as accurate as possible, so it looks like "real life," while other painters might want to change things up a bit. There's no right way to do it.

• Blend a small amount of color and paint a few test strips to see how it looks on a white background, rather than mixing up a whole tube of white and blue together to make light blue. Only make as much as you'll need.
• Tint your bright colors with a small amount of white to soften them, or add black to create different shades of the color. Adding the opposite color from the color wheel to one paint will create a different "tone," giving you an endless range of possibilities.
• Using a variety of contrasting value in your painting will help to create a more dynamic sense of color in your painting. Use many tones, shades, and tints, thinking seriously about color.

Learn to use, clean, and care for your brushes before you start painting. Before you're knee-deep in your masterpiece, get some experience getting the brush to hold an appropriate amount of paint and practice painting smooth, even lines with it. Don't worry about what you're painting, just paint some scratch while you're mixing up colors or thinning the paint out.

• Use short little brush strokes and long even ones. Use as little paint as possible on your brush to get the value you're looking for. Don't saturate the page with paint. Use different brushes for their different effects, blotting, drawing, and stippling with them.

Usually, you'll want to get the background in first, working from the back to the front of the painting. This lets you move from the general to the specific details, adding layers to create little details, rather than the other way around. If you start on the petals, the painting can end up looking out of balance. Experiment some to see what works best for you.

• Bob Ross, everyone's favorite television painter, was excellent at starting his paintings with backgrounds on the fly and using the imagination to get started. He usually found complementary colors and dry-brushed the background in nice sunset colors, then started filling in trees and other natural scenes without planning much of anything. It's an excellent way to get started on a canvas.

Identify the light source and the shadow to start adding value to the painting. Start adding the lightest colors and gradually create the darker tones. It's much easier to layer darker colors over lighter colors, rather than the other way around. Don't paint yourself into a corner. Mix small amounts of paint as you go, adding color judiciously and slowly.

Vary the amount of paint on your brush and the kinds of strokes you use with the brush to make different textures. Short little strokes can look like fur, while longer smoother strokes will flatten out the paint. Using less paint can help "age" the subject, while using more can thicken it and create density.

• If you screw up a part by adding too much paint, don't panic. Embrace happy accidents and integrate them into the painting. Don't spend too much extra time layering over it, just let it be and look back over it at the end to see how it effects the composition. Keep moving forward.

It's a good idea to focus on one part of the painting, working it through, before moving around. But figure out what works best for you. Some painters jump around the page, painting in different regions, depending on the shapes and the subject being painted. It'll depend on you. But in general, keep working on one part of the painting before moving elsewhere.

• It's also important to stand back and appreciate the "big picture." Pay attention to how your little moments affect the overall composition and the painting itself.

Painting is hard work! Don't get frustrated when you're first getting started. Now that you've got all the materials and the space set up, experiment with painting different subjects and keep developing your craft. If you tend more toward one type of painting, switch it up every now and then and paint different types of pictures. Keep making things.