No More Excuses, Start Painting Now

     First of all let me make it clear that I am not a professional artist. This means that I paint for fun and relaxation and not for money. Painting is also a means to shamelessly extract flattering comments from friends and visitors to build your ego. That said, If you are interested in painting as a profession to make some money, you need to find a professional artist to train under for a few years or go back to school to learn the proper means of smearing paint onto a canvas or paper.

     Understand that Art (in this case painting) for the making of money is like any other business. You need to market your product or have someone else, like an art gallery, market your work. There are thousands, if not millions of very good painters out there trying to sell their work. Those that have the best marketing system will sell the most for the most money. It is as simple as that.

     Now if you are interested in just learning from scratch how to get started as a painter, I can do that. I have been painting for about fifteen years without any formal training. Everything I have learned is from "how to" books or trial and error. I started painting in 1994 when, as a Department of Defense employee, my wife and I were stationed in Israel. Since we were limited by weight of what we could ship as household goods, we did not pack much in the way of wall hangings. The bare walls of the apartment we were assigned soon became annoying so we started to look around for some paintings to hang. Israel is kind of an artsy country and there is a great deal of art available. The wife and I both have fairly good taste so of course anything we could agree on, which wasn't much, was really expensive.

     After some searching and thought, I finally opened my mouth and told the wife that I thought I could do as well as most of the paintings we were viewing. Unfortunately, my wife threw down the challenge to prove it. Now my male ego was at stake and there was no way around my having to live up to what my mouth had said without consulting my brain. There you have the story of how and why I started painting. As the saying goes, that's my story and I am sticking to it.

     I went to an art supply store and bought a starter oil paint set a few brushes, a couple of how to paint books and a canvas. I finally selected as a subject a picture of the apartment building in which we lived. Mistake - it was too complicated for a first time artist. I finally got it finished but it was a mess. I would suggest you start with something more simple and work your way up.

     Let's discuss what you need to start your new hobby. That depends on what kind of painting you want to start with. The choices are: Oil based paints, Acrylics (water based paints), Water colors, or Pastels. All of these have their good and bad points and people chose one or the other for a variety of reasons. People pick the one with which they feel most comfortable and which results, in their opinion, in the best product.

     As a starter I would suggest Acrylics. There are no fumes, they are not flammable and they dry very fast. Fast drying can be good or bad, depending on what you are attempting to do on the canvas. With Acrylics you can sprits on a bit of water or use a special additive to delay the drying process. This medium is also great when it comes time to clean the paint off your hands and brushes because you only need soap and water and not a paint thinner.

     From an expense perspective Acrylics are a bit less costly. The average cost for small tubes of these paints is about five dollars. A starter set of paint will usually have about six to eight colors so you are looking at about thirty or so dollars. There are a lot of different brands but not to worry. Pick the cheapest or the ones on sale. All the brands will mix together.

     Next buy a set of cheap brushes. You should be able to get five to ten in a package for about five bucks. Buy a couple of one and two inch brushes also. If they are expensive at the art supply store go to a hardware store. You will also need a canvas or canvas board to paint on. The canvas boards are less costly and can usually be purchased in two or three to a pack. The draw back to the boards is that they must be framed for hanging. Canvas cost will vary widely based on size and quality. Buy the cheapest you can for the size painting you want. If you start selling your paintings for large sums of money then you can concern yourself with high quality supplies.

     You will need a place to work and something to prop your painting up while you work. An easel is the obvious choice with a large floor standup costing about fifty to one hundred dollars. A table easel will run from about twenty to fifty dollars. If you don't want to put that much into your hobby at this point, all you really need is a place to work, a table and a wall, books or some other way to prop up the canvas to work.

     All you need now is a subject and some self confidence. I find photographs to be the best means of providing your chosen subject matter. I would recommend that you chose a simple landscape photo, preferably with a tree or a small patch of trees. If you chose a picture of buildings or other structures it will be necessary, at least to begin with, to draw a grid on the picture and the canvas. After that you will need to do a rough sketch of the subject matter on the canvas to insure you have a close approximation of where parts of the structures belongs in the painting as compared to the photo. In other words if you have a church steeple in the upper middle of the picture you want to sketch it in the upper middle grid of the canvas. This will save you a great deal of time having to correct a misplaced item about half way through the painting. If you start out with a portrait photo of a person, good luck. I have never been able to do portraits to the degree I would actually show it to another human.

     Alright, you have your supplies, equipment, place to work and subject. You are ready to paint. There you sit or stand staring at the blank canvas confidence wavering and wondering where to start. The easiest thing to do is just take some paint on your hand or a large brush and smear it on to the canvas. It doesn't really matter what color but I usually use the prominent background color of the subject matter/photo I am working from. If I am going to do a landscape painting I will usually just smear a thick layer of blue across the top half of the canvas and a light brown across the bottom. Once you splash the first color onto the canvas you have become a painter. I have seen pieces in museums that don't look any better than what you just did.

     Once you get started and have painted a couple of works do not be afraid to experiment. Buy some "how to paint" books and try different approaches and different mediums. Your first works likely will be categorized as "primitive". That is not a criticism, just a category of painting. There are many artists that sell their "primitives" for thousands of dollars. Read and learn from books and the internet, where there are many free art clips you can view. Just Google search or go to You Tube and search under art instructions. Look at possibly doing some impressionist and expressionist works when you have built up your self confidence.

     If you do something and you don't like the finished product, you can always paint something else over it. Paint for yourself and do whatever with your paints and brushes makes you happy. Do not worry about what other people think of your work. No matter what you paint some people will love it and some will hate it. You will eventually come to consider any comment, good or bad, on your work as validation that you have produced a work of art that someone looked at with enough interest to comment. It is the people that look at your work and say nothing that are most frustrating.

.     I have about taken you as far as I can in a short article on how to get started. The bottom line is just do it. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. I do not know how many times I have heard people say they would love to learn to paint but they could not even draw a straight line. My response to that is you do not need the ability to draw a straight line to paint. If a straight line is needed that is why someone invented the ruler. They work just as well on a canvas as on a piece of paper. The real reason people do not follow up on a desire to learn to paint is that there is work and the possibility of criticism involved. If you really want to Paint do it now. Do not wait until some time in the future because the future never comes. When it gets here it is no longer the future it becomes the present and quickly becomes the past. Past accomplishments are notable but people are more interested in what you are doing today. Good luck and happy painting.