Question: Irene, do you have any tips on learning how to paint? I’ve wanted to paint as long as I can remember but I have no idea where to start.

I keep reading about colour theory, composition, design principles. But I’m confused about them all and I don’t know what to focus on!

Answer: YES, you bet I have tips!

In fact I created a whole system for beginners that teaches painting in a a fun, fast and friendly way. Read on!

These painting tips will work for all painters

I’m predominantly an oil painter, but I also paint with gouache and pastel. Once you know to paint in one medium, it’s not too hard to learn another: the principles of art and design are the same for all the visual arts.

What I teach are real fine art principles. Think of them as the A,B, Cs of painting. Once you learn them, you will be able to apply them to any art medium.

So let’s go!

But first, here’s a Free Ebook for you. If you want to learn to OIL PAINT, you will love my QuickStart Guide to Oil Painting. It’s easy to read. Has lots of photos. And designed to get you oil painting the right way, fast.

The best tips for learning how to paint are:

1. Start with the art medium that is calling to you

Some people think we need to start with watercolour, then progress up a chain with oil painting at the top because oil is the hardest painting to master.

But this isn’t true.

Mythbusting time: There is no right order to start painting! You can start with whatever paint you want.

All paint is made with the same pigment. Pigment is the actual colour. It’s what you mix the pigment with that makes the paints look and behave differently.

So my #DumaDoArtTip for beginner painters is: to start with whichever medium excites you! Follow your heart and curiosity.

Following your heart, excitement and curiosity is how we create an art practice that we LOVE!

Quick tips about the different art mediums.

• Watercolour is about controlling the flow of water. It’s a water-based medium that means it’s easy to clean up after. But many people say this is the hardest paint to master because it’s transparent any you can’t fix your mistakes! This can be frustrating for beginners.
• Gouache is opaque watercolour — that means it’s thick and can cover your mistakes. You use the same process with gouache as you do acrylic, oil and pastels: you start with the darks and move to the lights.
• Acrylic dries very fast, so it’s great for layering, but not so great if you want to blend. It’s water-based, so relatively easy to clean up, unless the paint has hardened. It dries nice and hard like oil, but a little lighter and flatter.
• Pastel has beautiful colours and you don’t need to learn to use a brush. But it’s expensive to start with because you can’t mix colours and so you need a pastel stick for every colour. Some artists have thousands of sticks.
• Oil is all about rich colour that stays vibrant and glossy even when dry, and keeps its peaks. Oil dries slowly, so that means you can blend and make corrections without having to rush. Some people say oil is the easiest to paint with, because it’s forgiving. That means you can fix your mistakes.

Each painting medium is wonderful and has its own charms. You will want to eventually try them all.

I always tell my students: “You won’t KNOW until you try.” And many painters paint in more than one medium because they each have their ‘special something’.

Not only is this a fun way to learn to paint, but it comes with built in motivation. This is how you will fall in love with painting and love showing up to paint. And as long as you keep showing up, you will get better!

2. Buy good quality paints and supplies (but you don’t need pro-level canvas)

The reason you need to buy good quality paints is because you won’t be able to mix nice colours with cheap or value-brand paints. And that will be very frustrating. So stick with brand name paints.

Brand name paints usually come in two grades: student or artist-grade paint.

The artist-grade paints are more expensive and will mix nicer paint colours because they use better quality pigments. Pigments are what make the actual colour.

But student grades, which are made for beginners, are perfectly fine to start with.

#DumaDoArtTip: Buy the best quality you can afford but that will not make you become anxious or miserly with your paints.

When starting out, we want to paint with lots of paint, and we want to paint often! We don’t want to be nervous or stiff when we paint: we want to give ourselves permission to paint the worst paintings possible!  

This frame of mind will not only helps us learn fast, it makes painting more enjoyable! And when we enjoy something, we stick with it!

If you want to start with artist-grade paints, go for it. The colours will be richer and more vibrant. But student-quality paints are A-ok to start with. You can mix student-grade and pro-grade together, so as you get better, you can also start replacing colours with artist-grade.

For oil and acrylic painters, you don’t need pro quality canvases.

While I recommend starting with good paints, I don’t recommend expensive canvases or wood supports for beginners. Good quality canvases are built for longevity. When we are just starting out chances our early work won’t hang in art museums, so we don’t need archival quality canvases.

What beginners need is to paint a lot —mastery comes from QUANTITY. So I suggest buying a lot of cheap and small canvas panels so that you are ready to paint—  even dollar store canvas panels will work. These are ready to go, don’t need any extra prep.

#DumaDoArtTip: If you want to start with oil paints, I have some oil painting supplies listed on this page.

For watercolour, gouache and pastel painters, the paper quality does matters more.

When painting with water-based paints, the paper quality will affect the way the water will be absorbed and this will have a big effect on your paintings. I recommend getting 140-pound watercolor paper to start— it can handle some light layering and scrubbing, and won’t buckle too much.

Many people consider watercolour the toughest medium to paint with because you can’t cover your mistakes. So stock up on beginner or student-level brand name watercolour papers and save the expensive cotton rag papers for later. As you get better and feel more confident, you can try the more expensive papers. But once again, quantity is what matters for beginners.

For pastel painters, paper quality is quite important

If you are painting with pastels— yes pastels are considered paints — then paper matters quite a bit. The paper needs “tooth” so that the pastel will stick to it. For this reason many pastel painters prefer sanded papers. These feel like sandpaper! They grip the pastel really well.

You can start painting on regular paper with pastels, but you won’t be able to layer too much. Many pastel painters start with a watercolour underpainting to which they add pastel on top.

Another surface pastel painters paint on is watercolour covered with a layer of fine pummice acrylic medium, or clear gesso. These are gritty and help the pastel to stick to the paper, so are another surface you might like to try. You won’t know until you try!

3. Learn to see things as shapes!

If music is all about hearing, painting is all about SEEING!

That’s what we are doing as visual artists — we are learning to see! And what painters need to see … are shapes.

This is why I tell my students that painting is perfectly fine for people who can’t draw. When learning to draw, most of us look for contour lines. Looking for shapes is a new way of seeing.

All objects can be broken down into shapes:

• a house is a square.
• a window is a rectangle
• a tree trunk is a cylinder
• a face is an oval
• a mountain is a triangle
• a person is a bunch of shapes

This is why the human body is the most complicated thing to paint: there are so many shapes! Hands are especially hard to draw! So don’t get dejected if your first results are wonky.

#DumaDoArtTip. I tell my students to start with landscapes. Seeing the shapes in landscapes is easier, and you can still get very pleasing results even if your drawing isn’t perfect.

#DumaDoArtTip: One way to start a painting is to break it down into 5-7 big shapes. Then break those shapes into 5-7 smaller shapes. Then you can add the details.

Here is an easy drawing exercise for painters, that will help you see shapes.

4. Learn the basics of composition

Composition is the arrangement of shapes on a canvas or paper to make a pleasing design. It is also a way to lead a viewer’s eye through a painting.

Learning composition is the easiest way for you to elevate your paintings and get them to stop looking amateurish.

When it comes to composition, we can thank the ancient Greeks who developed the Golden Ratio, a precise mathematical formula for pleasing compositions.

A simplified version of the formula is called the the rule of thirds. This works just fine and you don’t need any math!

How to use the Rule of Thirds to create beautiful paintings

Most beginners will put their main subject right in the centre. I think it’s because we are taught symmetry very early on. However, placing things off-centre is usually much more appealing. It adds movement to your artwork.

To use the rule of thirds:

• Divide the canvas into a tic-tac-toe grid or 9 equal rectangles.
• Place your focal point on a spot where 2 lines meet. The focal point is the main subject of your painting: the first thing you want viewers to look at.
• Avoid putting your horizon line right in the middle; place it one of the horizontal lines of the tic-tac-toe grid

My painting below is a good demonstration of the rule of thirds in action.

That’s enough composition for a beginner. Now go practice and play!

5. Start with a limited colour palette

You don’t need a lot of paint tubes to make a beautiful painting. In fact, using a few colours only, or what is known as a limited palette, will help keep your paintings from becoming garish. Using a limited palette to mix a wide variety of colours is the secret to beautifully harmonized paintings.

The split primary color palette

My favourite is the split primary colour palette. You can mix almost every colour when you use this one.

This is a very popular colour palette. It is comprised of a warm and cool of the 3 primary colours:

• a cool yellow, a cool red and a cool blue
• a warm yellow, a warm red and a warm blue.
• and Titanium White

What are warm and cool colours?

When we talk about colour temperature, we are talking about the perception of colours being seen as warm or cool.

• Cool colours are lemon yellow, icy blue, minty green etc. Cool colours are those found in the shadows, early morning light, or cloudy days.
• Warm colours are sunflower yellow, fiery red, and tropical blue. Use warm colours for things that are bathed in sunlight, or are in the glow of a late afternoon sun.

When we put cool temperatures against warm temperatures, we can make some really stunning colour combos.

My painting below of a fog lifting in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, has lots of warm colours that pop against the cool colours of the fog. .

After I have my 6 colours, I sometimes add an extra colour or two:

• I might add a purple or magenta, because these colours can be hard to mix
• I usually add a phthalo or viridian green to my mix because I live in Canada, and there’s a lot of green here in the summer, so this helps me make more green variations.
• yellow ochre makes nice sunny highlights, and is a great colour for toning your canvas.
• browns can also be used for toning your canvas. Mixing brown with ultramarine blue makes a nice black so you don’t need to buy black paint.

And that’s it! If you want to learn more about using a limited palette, I’ve written a longer blog post about it here.

6. Learn the basics of colour theory

Yes, colour theory is important but you don’t need to know the complete physics of light in order to start painting. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ll NEVER need to know the complete physics of light to paint. And I say this as someone who used to teach about light at a Science Museum!

In my opinion, when you start learning to paint, too much theory will be a waste.

1. it goes right over a beginner’s head
2. it dampens a beginner’s excitement. They don’t want to listen to lectures on art. Students want to be painting!

#DumaDoArtTip: We just a need a bit of colour theory to start playing and learning to see and mix colours. This is where the learning will come, from doing. And that’s why painting small is so useful… you get to finish a lot of paintings fast, and that means you get to learn fast!

Colour mixing basics

What I tell my beginner students is to start mixing colours the way they learned in kindergarten.

There are three primary colours:

1. yellow
2. blue
3. red.

When you mix these colours together, you will get the secondary colours:

Blue + yellow = green

Yellow + red = orange

Red + blue = purple

And now you have a full range of colours to play with!

As mentioned above, different pigments will result in different colour mixes. The better your paint quality, the nicer your colour mixes will be.

When mixing, your best bet is to just really look and try to match the colours as best you can. Because pigments all have different properties, they will create different colours when mixed. The more we practice, the better we will get, and we will also learn what pigments we like to work with best.

Learn the complementary colours

To start mastering colours, you should learn the complementary colours. These are colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel:

• blue and orange
• yellow and purple;
• and green and red

Complementary colours have some magical properties:

• when you mix complementary colours together, you tone down a colour — the colours become less saturated, but still beautifully harmonized. This is useful for creating different values (lightness or darkness of a colour) and for painting things that recede into the background.
• mixing complementary colours also makes blacks and greys.
• and when you place complementary colours together, they seem to vibrate or zing! This is great for drawing attention to the focal point in your painting.

That’s way more than enough colour theory to start with. Go play with these tips until you get comfortable.

7. Learn to see values

Here’s a popular phrase in art schools and communities:

“Values do all the work, but colour gets all the credit.”

Often, if a painting isn’t working, it’s the VALUES that are “off,” not the colour.

Values are the lightness and darkness of a colour. Imagine every colour from the lightest it could be (almost white), to the darkest (almost black), and then place 8 steps between them.

Most beginner painters don’t use enough values in their paintings. Their paintings look like those on the left.: flat and cartoony. The images on the right have many values.

Values can be tricky because sometimes colour plays tricks on our eyes.

To see values better, you can pop your photo into a photo editor and turn it into a black and white photo. Then you will see more clearly what is lighter and what is darker.

#DumaDoArtTip: A fast way to check if your values are right, is to take a short break. It can be 30 minutes. Or a day. When we come back, we can look at our painting with fresh eyes.

8. Learn the basic painting process

This was the trickiest part for me to learn. I found most teachers just skipped right over this. I think they had expert blindness—they had been painting so long they forgot what it felt like to be a beginner.

That’s why I created by Duma Do 10-step process for beginner oil painters. It’s to help them know what to do, and when.

I outline the Duma Do 10-step process for fine art paintings here in my my QuickStart Guide to Oil Painting. Just subscribe to get an instant download

Although this guide is for oil painting, the process works for acrylic, gouache, and pastel too. For watercolour just reverse the order and start with the lights and end with the darks.

And now for my best #DumaDoArtTip :

Have you always wanted to try oil painting? Then…

…you’ll love my Intro to Oil Painting course

Learn real fine art oil painting in a fun and fast way — with mini paintings, and mini steps. My students can’t believe how quickly they improve, and how fun it is to have their own little art practice.

Learn More and Enroll

9. Paint small and often

Switching to painting mini paintings was the best thing I did. It’s how I learned to paint fast and what got my work into 2 galleries in just over 2 years.

Here’s why it works: a painting takes a lot longer to finish than a drawing does. A 24″x24″ painting can take a minimum of 7 hours to paint! And if the end results leave you dejected, you may end up abandoning your painting practice too soon.

That’s where painting small excels:

• They can be finished in a short time. A 5″x7″ takes about an hour or two. And the more paintings you FINISH, the faster you will learn. Mastery depends on quantity!
• It’s also an economical and efficient way to learn to paint. A large canvas can be costly, and that can make you anxious about “ruining” it. But a 5″x7″ canvas panel will cost about a $1.
• When you paint small, you will be able to try new tools, techniques, exercises. You will also take more risks, explore more freely, and learn the principles of fine art more quickly.

The best part is everything you learn can be applied to big paintings — the principles of art are the same!

So, go stock up on 5″x7″ or 8″x8″ canvas panels and paint small and often!

Here are 25 more reasons that painting small makes big sense.

10. Stay playful!

Playing is how we learn best. It doesn’t matter if we are kids or adults.

“Play is a strategy for learning at any age.”

Mara Krechevsky, Project Zero researcher

This is why I don’t recommend too much theory at the start.

I feel it stifles our excitement. We want to get into the paint and play, and this just delays it.

It also just doesn’t make sense to us yet. It will go right over our head because we have no experience with the paint, tools, or process.

Instead, beginners should just get into the paint as soon as possible, so they can start playing with it.

It’s also what I recommend in my oil painting for beginners course and how I structured my classes.

I want you to follow your curiosity and excitement. This is how we create a painting practice we will love. It’s also how we will stay motivated and excited to keep learning, exploring, and finding our own style.

11. Just keep showing up

Here’s the good news! Mini steps WILL get you there!

Just master the habit of showing up and taking small, consistent actions, and over time they will add up to huge results.

When beginning a new habit, make it as easy — so small, you can’t say no.

Try a 1-2 minute drawing a day. Yes, you can do a drawing in a minute! When you make it this easy, it’s easier to overcome the initial resistance you may feel. You can ease into the habit without feeling overwhelmed or stressed.

Then, when that becomes easy, add one painting session a week.

If you show up every day and try to be just 1% better than the day before, you will be be 37 times better at the end of one year. That’s what James Clear says in his bestseller, Atomic Habits.

To help you remember, here’s my Duma Do Roadmap to Mastery!

And that’s it!

That’s more than enough for a beginner oil painter to think about. Go start playing. It’s so fun.

Click to watch a time lapse of me painting a mini painting.

• I’m painting on 5″ x 5″ watercolour paper coated with 2 coats of gesso and then toned with yellow ochre paint. It took about an hour and a half to paint.
• I am using a limited colour palette.
• See at 1:18 how I correct the darks that I lost.

Now go get your paints and PLAY!

P. S. If you have more questions about learning how to paint, please drop them in the comments and I will answer them!