Backstory

Lessons I’ve learned

• Making even a little bit of art daily is important. It doesn’t need to be fancy or time-consuming, just a sketch on a piece of paper is enough. If you want to paint, paint! Have some canvas paper ready and just go for it, no need to worry about making a masterpiece. If you like it enough you can always re-paint it on a canvas later.
• Shaping your environment to be conducive to the art you want to make is extremely important, if not one of the most important things you can do for yourself. If you don’t have space to paint, how will you paint? There’s a fine line of course, we can’t all make full-sized studios in our apartments, but it’s not too hard to set up a small easel on a desk. I’ve found that now that I set up a space with an easel and a screen for reference, I’m painting much more, because I no longer have the barrier of needing to set up my space before I start.
• Keeping a pocket sketchbook and a pen/mechanical pencil has been an important habit in my artmaking. I get a lot of ideas from observing the world and just sketching something real quick. I love sketching people on the train, even though it’s difficult. I mostly just try and capture their pose quickly and then use memory to fill in the blanks on their outfit. I make big mistakes sometimes, I’ll look back after finishing a quick sketch and see they wore their hat the opposite direction. You win some, you lose some.
• Going to museums and seeing art in-person has always been a lot of fun for me. Making the time to go is harder, but it’s worth it. I bring my sketchbook to sketch sculptures and paintings I like, and I bring my iPad to practice painting (since you can’t paint at the Met unless you participate in their copyist program or take a class that lets you do it). There’s always something to learn at a museum!
• Finding time for art is another difficulty I had for a long time, but reducing time spent in other areas is really the best way I’ve found to better integrate it into my life. I’ve never been that huge into social media, but I found TikTok to be extremely addicting. As fun as the memes were, I realized it was interfering with the things I wanted to do, so I uninstalled. I don’t even have Instagram on my phone anymore. We’ve also cut a lot of TV and streaming from our lives, so there’s simply been more time for drawing and painting.

• Painting and drawing are different but related skills. Being a good draftsman will help you become a better painter and being a good painter will help you be a better draftsman, but it’s kind of hard to put the two skills together at first. I find myself needing to “switch modes” once I finish the underdrawing of a painting to a more painterly approach. It seems to me that the key to getting better is to do both a lot. Beginners are often told to not paint because they’re better off learning how to draw with those materials since it’s cheaper, but I think there’s a lot of value in making bad paintings and not delaying.
• Painting can be very expensive or very cheap depending on how you approach it. Going cheap at first is a good idea, but low quality brushes tend to lose hairs quickly, lose shape and break, and low quality paint tends to mix weird or have weird drying properties. Neither of these points should dissuade someone from using cheap materials, but I prefer not to buy things twice, so I go for mid-range brushes and artist grade paint. That seems to be the sweet spot, as the artist grade paint makes mixing easier, and the brushes get the job done without being super expensive. 
• Gloves make cleanup a breeze. I don’t use them for watercolor, but I like using them for oil and acrylic painting. I only use them on my left hand, which is usually holding a rag of some kind to wipe my brush. I used to use them on both hands, but I think that’s excessive.
• Toxicity in painting is kind of weird, because the debate surrounding it is full of anecdotes and personal experience rather than hard science. Unfortunately, there are very few toxicological studies geared towards artists and long-term use of these materials, so at most you have to rely on the company’s SDS (Safety Data Sheet). While you don’t need cadmiums, flake whites, etc., they’re very good at what they do as colors, and most classes will have them on the supply list. Ultimately, I use toxic pigments, but use non-toxic solvents as my main tools.
• I love shortcut colors. I understand that it’s important to avoid them at first to learn color mixing. But they are so useful, especially if you’re short on time, like when you’re plein air painting. I love Dioxazine Purple, it’s one of my favorite pigments, such a beautiful color. I like making chromatic blacks with it, it really makes the black “pop” even if it isn’t realistic. Or Sap Green, which saves me a ton of time mixing greens for a landscape. Naples Yellow has become a favorite in my oil painting palette as well, it’s a nice way to lighten up a color without using Titanium White. Sometimes it’s important to take classroom advice with a grain of salt because ultimately you can do whatever you want in a painting and use whatever colors you want. I was thinking of picking up a magenta, cyan, and teal recently because James Gurney wrote about CMYK as painting primaries and I’m interested in trying it out.

• Acrylics are awesome, I don’t think they get enough credit for how awesome they are. They’re cheaper than oil paint and don’t need mineral spirits to dissolve. Golden makes excellent acrylics with a very good consistency. The main reason they get a lot of heat is that they dry very quickly, so it’s hard to blend edges together unless you do it immediately. But I don’t really see a problem with that, it just means that edges need to be handled in the moment rather than later.
• Acrylic is great for painting sketches. I have an XL Canson mixed media sketchbook that I’ll paint on for studies of bigger painting ideas I have. I’ve been using it a lot more lately to practice my color mixing for oils too, since the pigments behave similarly.
• They sell slow drying acrylics for people who want to use them more like how they’d use oil paint. I can’t vouch for them, but I’m interested in trying them out and writing a review sometime in the future.
• I have a bottle of slow-drying medium I’ve yet to try, and I’m thinking I’ll do some comparisons soon.

• Watercolor is simultaneously the easiest and hardest medium in my experience. It has a low skill floor (easy to pick up), but a high skill ceiling (difficult to master).
• Simply putting color on a drawing is so easy with watercolor. All you need is watercolor paper of some kind, a pencil, and your paint with water. It’s so simple!
• Clean up is a breeze, it takes seconds to rinse your brushes and be on your way.
• It’s easy to “mess up,” but with watercolor you need to trust the process a bit. Sometimes you’ll put too much water and it’ll create a weird effect on your perfectly rendered face and you just gotta accept it, let it dry, then try again.

• Some of the biggest hurdles with oil paint have nothing to do with painting, but around the materials. Oil paint is hard to clean out of your brushes without a brush cleaner of some kind, such as gamsol, artist-grade turpentine (turpenoid), etc. But all of those are toxic and not something you want to use at home without good ventilation. There are alternatives such as using linseed oil to clean your brushes, but that has its own issues. What I’ve been using for home painting are the lavender brush cleaners from Chelsea Classical Studio. They smell pretty strongly of lavender, but I’d much rather have a pleasant smell than whatever the hell turpenoid smells like.  The SDS on those show that you don’t need any special equipment or ventilation to use them, but I still keep a fan going with the windows wide open anyway.
• Oil painting is easier if you do things in layers, layers meaning painting over dried oil paint across multiple sessions, but it’s time consuming to do that. For oil paint to be dry to the touch (without medium) it can take a week+ depending on the pigments you used. 
• Painting alla prima lets you paint in “layers” (technically it’s all one layer when it comes to drying) and develop a painting quickly. I’m a big fan and the painting classes I take in Chelsea are alla prima. However, it is difficult to develop a good painting in just one session of about 3 hours, so it can be a bit discouraging at times. Maybe someday!
  • One of the main difficulties I had when I first started with alla prima is that it’s easy to apply too much thinned out paint which doesn’t stick to the canvas. The balance I’ve found to work for me is a 4 step approach: 1. Apply a  thinned base layer with a color like transparent red oxide, but not too thin. A bit of thinner with linseed mixed together to get a somewhat less than buttery texture. 2. Draw using thinned burnt umber (a bit thicker than the base layer). 3. Paint big shapes and values for areas like the background with a bit of thinner/linseed, a buttery texture compared to the first layer. 4. Start painting without thinning anymore, just paint out of the tube mixed together. If I think I’ll be painting on the piece again, I don’t use much medium.
• Oil painting is great for plein air because you don’t have to worry about the paint drying quickly. I wouldn’t use regular acrylics outdoors (but apparently the slow-drying ones dry closer to oils) and my experience with watercolor outdoors is that it dries significantly faster than at home and the studio, making the medium even more stressful than usual. Similarly, gouache is great for plein air, but also dries kinda quickly depending on the weather. Oil is tough to beat in terms of convenience, if only it was easier to lug everything!
• Oils are very beautiful while applying the paint, it has a nice shine to it, but that does go away when it dries. People often use medium like linseed oil to get that shine in their paintings and afterwards you can get back the shine with a gloss varnish. I’ve been using gamvar lately to great effect.

• I’m no expert on creativity, but I have experience with a lot of blockers! I can at least focus on those.
• Classes are both good and bad. Technique is useful and important, but it’s easy to just go to class and do the reps and not ever think about why you signed up in the first place. It probably was to make something, some idea you had. 
• I have a bad habit of getting into the zone and drawing fast, but it’s easy to miss things that way. My own journey has been slowing down and checking my work more often, which has helped me a lot.
• I used to free sketch a lot pre-pandemic. No reference, just random doodles of things that would pop up in my head. I think it’s important to do that even if you’re a realist painter because it helps you think about composition and generates ideas. I’ve been doing it a lot more lately and it’s giving me some great ideas for some upcoming paintings.
• I understand why classes tell students to focus on drawing first, but I think “good students” like myself take the rules too seriously. One of the advantages of learning as a child is there’s no fear of failure, which makes it much easier to experiment. I wish I had gotten into painting much earlier even if I was bad at it and my adult fear held me back from trying it for many years.