PAINTER

Most Artists begin to develop their own techniques and individual style after a long period of experimentation and discovery. As a beginner, it makes sense to experiment as much as possible with many different approaches to painting so that you can build up a technical repertoire and discover ways of working that suit your personality.

 If you begin by painting small, simple objects, preferably with some sort of personal meaning, you will be able to concentrate on how you paint and not worry about extraneous details, or the initial difficulties of drawing.  It you look at the work of past and present painters whose style you admire, you will see that in most cases it is largely a question o what is actually left out in the process of painting that makes their work so successful.  Simple domestic objects or toys make good subjects when you start to  paint.  They generally have a nice simplicity, which makes them appropriate subjects for drawing and painting.  Start  by painting what you see as straight forwardly as possible, and then carefully filling the outlines in, stage by stage, with a small soft bristle brush.  This is good way of discovery the feel of the medium and leaving how to control your brush.  After all, the basic art of painting is very much  about matching what you can see imagine or even recall with particular mixture of color applied in a certain way of developing style and technique. 

Painting familiar subjects will help you to build up the confidence to experiment with the objects you work with.  Practise laying in the shadows on a flower with a range of tones for instance, or blending separate colors with a dry brush to achieve the smooth rounded finish of an egg.  If you chose to paint to rough textural object, such as a piece of drift wood or a small rock, try a different technical approach and represent the crags and facets that characterize these objects with a range of different  tones and loose, chunky brush strokes.

Once you have looked at individual objects on their own, you may decide to paint a more complex arrangement that includes a number of objects.  Here your approach to painting can be just the same, except that you will have to make decisions about how you organize your composition.  Try to establish a scene of balance between the forms.  This does not mean that what you see must be said and solid, more that there should be a link or a thread running through the arrangement that binds it together.  You should also decide what kind of visual impact you want the composition to make a composition that fills the frame will convoy a sense of boldness and generosity or you can create a feeling of separateness of isolation by painting gaps between objects.  This kind of experimentation with simple, accessible forms can be  valuable in experimenting with styles and approaches, giving you the confidence you need before deciding to tackle the more difficult subjects of portraits and landscapes.