I Want To Paint

I'd go with Acrylic myself.

Water is easier to work with in that it will dry quicker, allowing you to experiment more. However, in my opinion it's a tougher medium to work with than Oil on which you may constantly paint over and over the same surface.

It is much earier to oil paint.

Oil paint is easiest and by far the most expensive.

I love watercolor, great for sketching, but not very forgiving.

Honestly, I'd suggest that you start with drawing -- pastels, pencil or charcoal. Then when you feel more comfortable with getting what is in your head on what you see in front of you on paper, moving on to painting.

You expect to detect if you have talent immediately? Facility with depicting something 'realistically' is a function of hand eye coordination and some people do have that to start with more than others do, although it can quite often be achieved by the not immediately facile with practice. But making art with paint can involve something aside from all that, and that is a matter of developing a state of mind, a way of looking and seeing. This tends to take more than a week - perhaps a lifetime. Good teachers can help most in this part of it. It's really a course of exploration over time.

On class or teaching yourself for a while, I see the attraction to both. I've taught myself caligraphy and some origami. sumi-e brush painting, all at a beginning level. For painting - I think a good class is energizing - but then I had, for the most part, sharp teachers. I would drag myself in there after work, and leave three hours later on top of the world.... and not because of any great personal talent.

Real water color is very difficult. I'd go with acrylic myself. Oils are fun, but messy, and don't dry for months. If you want to use oils anyway, get the water-based ones. They still take months to dry, but there's no smell & cleanup is minimal.

Acrylics have loads of advantages.

I have a probably irrational dislike of acrylics.

They're just so... inorganic. :-?

I agree they're probably the most practical suggestion, though.

Acrylics are to fat crayons as Oils are to sharpies.

Or should I say
Acrylics are to oils as Fat Crayons are to Sharpies

That's very Zen, zinc. What does it mean?

I'd say try watercolors. It's true you need a LOT of control to master them, but they're great to fool around with when you're trying to learn. They're very immediate. You can get a set of pans that's a step up from the kids' crayola watercolors for three or four bucks at just about any crafts store or art supply store. Get a couple of brushes--a wide one, a medium size, a small pointy one. Get a couple jars of water. Fool around with colors. Try all the colors you've got. Mix one into another in all combinations. Let base colors dry and paint over them with a new color. Don't worry about making something that looks like anything--make blobs, lines, geometric shapes, abstract shapes, watch what happens when you have a pool of liquid color and you drip another color in it, swirl them around. Watch them as they dry (it's permissible to use a hair dryer). Go to the library and get just about any book on beginning as an artist (set a recent one that has a lot of big color pages). Read about tonal values and color mixing. Walk in a park or by the river. Look at trees. look at grass. look at colors. Look at shadows. Look at all the shades of green in different plants. Look at how trees aren't brown. Look at highlights--how some leaves are brighter than others on a tree.

Draw something--flowers are good. Draw a bowl or a lamp--not a person (we're HARD to draw). Tryt to get the proportions right--measure the size of something as it appears to you by holding up a pencil to it and moving your finger along it until you have the correct size proportionally==height and width----try reproducing that on the paper. Look at the shadows--how can you reproduce those by using different pencil strokes. Try using watercolor washes on your drawing to get some color into them.

You're having fun, you're not being Leonardo da Vinci right off the bat.

And try a class. An old girlfriend got me a watercolor class for my birthday at a local adult education center. Six classes, I think, for about a hundred bucks, with a dozen people. We were better than some (which felt good) and worse than others (which was kind of a spur to get better), but everyone had some good points, and it was really supportive. A great birthday present (can you talk someone into getting you one?--start casually mentioning it now).

I started (when I returned to art after a 40 year break) with charcoal and pastel drawings, then I took up acrylics and have never regretted it. They can be thick and creamy like oils or thinly transparent like watercolors. They don't smell and they dry fast, which is both convenient and inconvenient, depending on your purposes. And don't pay attention to the criticism that they are flat. I don't think that is necessarily so. And buy from Golden.

I want to paint
Now that you mention it, JL, pastels are great. I love using them, but they do make a mess, and if you want to spray fixative on them you have to find a very well ventilated place - like the great outdoors.

Probably the easiest medium to control is either pastels or acrylics.

Sozobe - why do you object o the "non-organic" aspect of acrylics? They use many of the same ingredients as oils which are themselves not exactly chemical free. In fact, if you want to use the cadmiums, you've got a relatively natural but highly toxic mix right there, oil or acrylic.

I never use cadmiums!!!!

And pastels are expensive to frame, if that is a consideration. Beside "fixing" them, glass must be used in the framing.
With acrylics, I occasionally do not feel the need to frame the pictures.

Why not start off with a cheap kids watercolour set and see if you can get to grips with a still life.
There is no point spending a fortune on either oils or watercolours.
Dont forget brush shapes can effect the outcome of a stroke.

I want to paint
The trouble with cheap kids watercolour sets is that their colors are apt to be muddy and that gets very discouraging. The cakes in them have much more filler than good half-pans.

I would suggest student-grade watercolors, and only a few colors at that. You don't have to spend a fortune for just 5 or 6 tubes; don't get the exotic colors - mix your own. Or get a small set of half-pans (I think Winsor & Newton have a line called Cotman that would be suitable and not very expensive).

Personally, although they are certainly convenient for carrying around, I find the cakes awkward for covering large areas of your paper; tubes give more coveerage for the money; I also find that tube colors are more intense on the paper. But that may just be me.

P.S. "Half-pans" are the standard size of watercolor cakes.

if you want to do watercolors, why not start with one color? just get some black or brown ink - that way you can put a few drops of it into a few little bowls of water - from lightest to darkest - i usually have about 3 or 4 bowls. that way you can practice shapes, shadding, test out how different brushes work, etc. it's fun.

That's a great idea! I do it myself sometimes.

Color can be a real distraction, upstaging everything else about a painting, and the discipline of using just one color forces attention to be paid to other aspects of painting.

I'd say start with drawing - pencil sometimes and charcoal sometimes and work from life, not from photos or other peoples paintings.

I prefer oils to acrylics but use acrylics for underpainting and mixed media. It's a personal thing that you'll work out as you go along.

Watercolours are hard as mistakes are not so easy to correct but they are the way most people seem to begin.

I'd say do go to a class as you'll start off with more idea of how materials behave and what is possible than you will muddling through on your own.


Also there are art forums on the web where you'll be able to see other leaners work and ask questions about materials and techniques and ideas.