Ask HN: How can I learn how to paint?

If Monet and Hopper is what fuels currently your interest, then just go for it! Pick a work that draws you the most and set it as goal to copy it.

It's a most intimate and rewarding way to connect with your favorite artist! You'd naturally discover and learn tons of stuff both about the artist and techniques.

I'd opt to use just pencil at first, just to get the feeling of the lines, shapes, and flow of the curves/angles. Pencil is the most readily available medium, you likely already have some basic ability to draw lines ( straw man drawings are still drawings!).

To make this 'organized', I'd buy a simple sketchbook, that you'd carry with you, ready for use any moment you'd get time and drive to draw.

Next, very soon, you could explore the color layer by using .... a box of Crayola pencils. Cheap, portable, Real! Same art work now with adding color, strokes too.

Your sketchbook is your diary, good for notes and questions too!

At some point trying out paints becomes just a choice of medium. Keep your motivation burning - the artists you like are excellent guides. But instructors are here for that exact reason to answer your call and help unblock your progress. Boiling in your own juices too long could get you over-cooked :)

And, hey, your sketchbook is your passport on this fun journey! Profitez bien!

Best way to learn to draw is to go to a life drawing session. Drawing the human figure will be a great challenge and will teach you to look at your subject.

Moving onto painting... Read some basic colour theory. Artists say the primary colours are: Red; Blue; Yellow. They mean: Magenta; Cyan; Yellow really. Start with a 6 colour pallette, a warm version and a cool version of each primary colour.

I'm currently attempting to forge a career as a professional artist: https://www.james-o.tools/

She practices drawing all of the time. She goes to live figure drawing at the local art school every week. Basically what I am saying is that from what I understand to get to a high level of technical skill painting, you start with a high level of technical skill drawing. There may be other ways, but this seems to be the typical path.

The first piece of advice I’d give you is to go out and buy some books. Specifically, aim to buy things that you think you’ll still want to refer to no matter how far you take your skill, rather than books aimed at beginners: books designed as reference books and aimed at artists are ideal. First book I bought was ‘Color and Light’ by James Gurney. Also, buy the book Art & Fear if you don’t own it already.

At first, this is all about fear of failure. One of the main differences in the way children learn to adults is that children don’t have this fear. It’s taught and it can be unlearnt, but you’re probably going to have to confront it at some point. Sooner is better. Books and lessons aimed at beginners almost never help here. The usual beginner-type books instead try to teach lessons that you can succeed at, trying to avoid doing things that trigger that fear. To learn, you need to try to do things you can’t already do, not avoid them (this is also the key difference between practice and rehearsal. To learn something new, you need to make sure to practice and not rehearse).

What I think is that it's better to try to learn from sources that are beyond you than those that are already in your grasp. The problem is that at first, it’s very discouraging to try to do these kinds of things. So particularly at first, I’d recommend dealing with your feelings about painting much more than the actual skill itself. In particular, remember things that make you want to paint so you can find a reason to paint every day. When it comes to fear, curiosity is its antidote. If you try to achieve a specific effect in a particular painting, you can fail and that hurts; if instead you’re just curious about what would happen if you try something new, the results are just interesting. Occasionally they’ll be much better than you’re expecting, and those instances are addictive.

The overall process of learning these skills is interesting: at first it’s a bunch of small isolated skills, like the fine motor skills needed to make your brushes go where you intend. It’s quite frustrating because things don’t work together at first - so you might find that you're able to draw individual shapes quite well but they all look wrong when you try to put them together into a picture, or your shading will always look blobby and weird in an actual picture even though it looks OK when you focus on just that. Here’s the interesting thing: the isolated skills start to link up and it seems to be a sudden thing.

For example, I once set aside a day to just focus on learning how to build up shadows as nothing had ever worked well in the past and found to my surprise that there was nothing left to learn - things I’d already learnt just linked together and everything I tried came out exactly as I'd intended (which was a great feeling as I'd been learning for 2 years at that point and 'draws weird shadows' was starting to etch it's way into my identity). I had a similar experience with learning to draw in perspective.

There’s another stage too: after a while of things linking up it develops into a kind of language - which makes me wonder if that’s what language actually is: just a way to organize and regulate different interconnected parts of the mind: it definitely explains a lot about why the experience of drawing and painting comes so naturally to some people yet is so hard to properly explain to others.