Painting confidence etc

[dillinger]

Okay so Ive been into art for as long as I remember, Ive always wanted the confidence to enjoy painting but my own feelings of how crap I am always stop me.

I did well at art at school, I studied it at college for a short while but had to leave (dont ask) so I know the 'need' to paint is there but its been so long Ive shut myself off and I dont know where to begin. Ive got supplies that will be fine for now but I really dont know where to start.

There arent any courses available for me at the moment, and I have my children during the day so any tips/advice etc would be much appreciated. Even if I was to attempt something of an evening I would still be self conscious with having dp in the room!

Thankyou

I am an Art Teacher and I generally think that it is impossible to be 'crap' at painting, instead you are probably judging yourself against inappropriate examples.

what sort of paintings are you trying to create because if you are trying to be very 'realist' you probably will get disappointed.

try looking instead at lots of different art as inspiration, in particular I get my students to look at illustration to see that you don't have to recreate a perfect mirror image of something to create an interesting image.

another thing I teach my students is that art is like any other talent you have to practice at it before you can get better, the more you draw and paint the better you will get and the happier you will be because you will start to see improvement of your own work.

I think that you definitely need to paint in your own space away from DP or DC's mainly because you need peace and quiet to contemplate what you are doing. so go into another room, even better if you can set up a small space as your studio space so that you can put earlier sketches/attempts on the wall, not so that they make you feel negative about what you are doing but so that you can refer to them and analyse where you want to try and improve.

Never being totally happy with what you are painting and wanting to do it better is what drives artists!

lastly if you suffer from worrying about ruining a perfect white canvas/paper and then this stops you from even starting a painting then paint over the whole canvas with a thin wash of brown paint it is amazing how this affects the way you think about starting a painting.

Thankyou so much for such an informative post. We do have a small room that has always been 'too small for anything' and so holds a lot of junk so maybe I could do something with that, shut myself away a bit.

I have no idea what it is I want to try and achieve though, do you recommend finding an item and trying to draw that first?

painting 'still life' is a really good way to start,
probably the easiest place to start is to put some material on a table and set up some fruit on it or a variety of bottles and go from here,

aim to fill your whole canvas/page
sketch out your composition in charcoal or pencil first (but don't spend ages on this)
try not to have a really small group of objects in the middle of your page it is more interesting for things to be too big and go off the page than be too small.

spend more time looking at your still life than you do painting - observation should be at least 90% of your activity

try not to use black paint, only use it to darken other colours not on its own. so instead use dark purples greens or blues

look at Matisse and Cezanne and their still life paintings to see that you don't have perfectly recreate an object to be a lovely painting. (even if you're not a big fan they are still useful)

if you can, take a day out to an art gallery or two e.g. The National Gallery or The Tate Britain, as seeing paintings in the flesh will help you to understand the processes used to paint them as you will be able to see the individual paint brush strokes and the colours used, whereas looking at reproductions in books or online will never be able to give you this

Brilliant thankyou for your help