How to Become an Artist
How to become an artist and learn to paint beautiful landscapes.
On this page we talk about learning to use the brushes, and then we look at arrangement, tones of colors, and perspective.
Learn to use the brushes well.
Learning to use the brushes is like learning to ride a bicycle or learning to eat with chopsticks.
At first you will be a bit clumsy and your thoughts will be on how well you pick up and lay down the paint.
After practicing you will become less aware of how you use the brush and this will give you complete concentration on arrangement, tones of color and perspective.
Using the brush will become second nature to you, the same as learning most skills.
Hands on, and you will soon learn how to be an artist. The best way to learn to use the brush is to get into it and paint lots of little pictures quickly.
Don’t try to get everything right but just get the paint on quickly, to the best of your ability, and your skills will soon flourish.
Do not try to paint a masterpiece till you can use the tools, just paint simple pictures.
Do not waste time fiddling around with little brush strokes or sketching in before you paint.
Use bold brush strokes, you will make mistakes, the brush is an extension of your hand, it takes time to acquire the skill and fiddling around painting and hoping for a miracle will not help.
Exercise :- Try this, load the tip of a 1 inch house painting brush with paint (oil or acrylic or house paint if you wish) on a board, any board, about 18 inches wide, start from one side and paint crosses overlapping each other across the board. Stop and reload if the brush runs out of paint.
Do this a few times to loosen up your hand and then try relaxing and half shutting your eyes while brushing.
This is how you should feel while painting, in complete control, relaxed and not worrying about mistakes.
Practice makes perfect.
So practice brushing without trying to create a scene, paint squares and circles over and over faster and faster, enjoy watching the paint come off the brush, go outdoors and paint your garden shed with a 5 inch brush, paint big branches all over the shed in one brush stroke, then paint blobs of foliage on the end of the branches, if you use only one color you can finish your exercise by painting over the whole shed and nobody will know you are an artist.
It does not matter what or where you paint, you need to train your hand to use the brush.
Using the brush is an acquired skill and not a gift.
Do not keep dipping your brush in water for acrylics or in turps if you are painting in oils.
The brush should be wiped clean each time before picking up a color, otherwise if you have completely unloaded the brush it might not always be necessary to wipe it clean.
I work with brush in one hand and a cloth in the other, therefore the brush gets wiped constantly after unloading.
The only time a brush needs washing is after the painting session is finished or if it becomes too messy.
The painting knife
The painting knife must also be wiped clean before picking up paint again.
Otherwise you are wasting time and paint as you will only be putting the dirty color from the knife onto your lovely painting.
Again, you will not learn to use the tools by fiddling around with little brushes and little brush strokes, you can fiddle around after you learn to use the tools, maybe while adding the fine twigs in the foreground of a painting or that last bit of sunlight bouncing off the rocks or trees.
First, think about this
There are 2 things you will be doing –
Number 1 is, learning how to apply the paint. You should do this by painting lots of simple little pictures. (learn to use the tools, practicing the brush strokes, techniques)
Number 2 is, learning where to apply the colors. You will do this by seeing the lessons and going outdoors to see for yourself how the world actually looks. (learning what makes a great painting, theory, arrangements, tones of colors, perspective), it is all explained here in these following pages.