What the "Self-Taught Painter" Needs to Know at the Beginning
Going to art school is not a qualifier to being an artist. Your creative curiosity and voice is valid with our without formal training!
While not a requirement, art school does offer something unique: a formal curriculum designed by industry experts, a community of other artists, with dedicated guidance and feedback as you explore.
Your creative impulse and artistic voice is no less valid, but it does mean you may have to navigate certain things with less structure than you would get in art school.
Before I continue, I want to be clear: Your creative voice is valid with or without extra training. It’s more important to me that you simply show up and make something, expressing yourself. However, if you are looking to improve and are not sure where to start, use this as a guide. And know you are already enough as an artist.
Think of art making like speaking a language. Nobody enters into Spanish 1 able to speak in fluent paragraphs. It takes dedicated time spent learning the foundations in order to even string together a proper sentence, let alone a conversation that twists and weaves and improvises (still talking about painting, don’t worry!).
Making art is the same way. Learning fundamental building blocks of visual art is the same foundation. It takes a little time, probably frustration (we have ALL been there!), but with patience and practice, sentences begin to form.
With those sentences, you grow in confidence, and paragraphs form. Eventually, you are able to string together paragraphs and place your unique voice within them, and you’ve written a novel.
It’s amazing.
But let’s back up. Those fundamentals. While there are so many ways to make art completely disregarding the basics, (which is okay!), there is a lot of value in taking the time to understand the fundamentals in developing artists.
Understanding fundamentals in art making gives you the confidence and skill to say what you want to say with your work. You can always break the rules, but it can really help to first learn them. Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@cottonbro/
Understanding the fundamentals gives you confidence in what you make, as well as tools you can use in expressing yourself later on. Even the most abstract painter will use color and value in their work.
In this article, you will learn some basic fundamentals of artmaking that will empower you as an artist and inform your decisions as you progress along your journey. I will also include a few books you can purchase to start your journey in the right direction.
(This is primarily focused on traditional 2D methods of art making, mostly in relation to drawing and painting.)
What the “self taught artist” needs to know at the beginning
First and foremost, before you set out on this journey, remember to enjoy the process. If “mastery” is your goal, keep in mind this is a lifelong journey. If you simply want to get better at painting one kind of thing, that’s great, too!
(You may enjoy another article published, exploring the essential mindset shifts for the self taught artist).
Your “curriculum” will vary widely based off of your goals. And, because growing as an artist is a lifelong process, it will likely morph and change over time. However, there are a few basic fundamentals that will empower you to create pretty much anything with continued practice, which are a great place to start from.
FUNDAMENTALS OF ARTMAKING
Below is a list of basic 2D artmaking fundamentals that will serve you for the rest of your time as an artist. Based of your interests and goals, you can choose to deep dive into any of these in whatever medium excites you.
Fundamentals you can learn with any medium include:
Value
Color Theory
Composition
Drawing from observation
Rules of Perspective
Basic knowledge of art history (after all, that’s what got us here!)
Understanding qualities of your chosen medium
Keep reading, and you will learn a little bit about what each fundamental consists of, as well as affordable book and course recommendations to guide you in your beginning stages.
You do not have to go to art school to be an artist. Understanding and practicing the basic fundamentals is an important part of your journey in developing the language of art. Once you have a grasp on those, you have the tools to string together novels! image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@cottonbro/
Value
Value is basically the spectrum of dark to light, and it is the backbone of an image. Correct use of value is what makes something look like it is three dimensional, sitting in space in a believable way. You may not be interesting in creating realistic artwork, but an understanding of value and how to create that illusion will serve you in any type of abstract work you want to do, as well. Value is a useful tool in composition as well.
I cover the basics in my Oil Painters for the Beginners class. It is a simple concept but does take practice to both see and execute. Value drawings and paintings are like scales in music. They can feel mundane and redundant, but are integral in tuning your hand eye coordination as an artist.
(Did I just reference hand eye coordination? Fact: Nothing gives me more anxiety than being asked to catch or throw a ball. Hey, we all have our things!)
Value is king when it comes to painting something “representationally” (where your piece looks like what you want it to). Once you tune your eye to notice value, everything else falls into place.
Color Theory
“Color Theory” is a super academic term that encompasses everything you probably never wanted to know about color. This can get extremely meta super quick. Depending on your curiosity, you can deep dive into optics and math and numbers with this.
However, you don’t have to (whew!).
The most important aspects of color theory that you need to understand and get started is the value of color (I teach that in my oil painting course), as well as the temperature of color.
What is color temperature? If red/orange/yellow is hot and blues are cool, a color will be warmer or cooler depending on how red or blue it is. Easy enough, right? The temperatures correspond to our innate understanding of real temperature.
This is an entire topic in itself, with a shelf full of books I could share with you, but here’s a quick jist:
Obviously, based off of the description above, red is warm. However, you can have a warm red and a cool red. The warm red will have more yellow in it (think, Cadmium Red Light) and the cool red will have more blue in it (Alizarin Crimson).
Gamblin Artist Colors has a great article about color temperature.
This is something that, just like value, takes practice for your eye to recognize. Here is a great book you can start with.
Recommended resource: The New Munsell Student Color Set . Here is my very loved copy, third edition.
The Munsell Student Color Book
Without going into too much detail, the Munsell System is simply one way of categorizing color. I find it fascinating, but it can be a little heady.
However, I highly recommend this student book because of the color exercise within it. You get blank pages and small squares of color to arrange yourself on the pages.
It can be a little tedious, and it does take a couple of hours, but by the end of it, you will be amazed at what your eye has started to notice. Nothing helped me understand (intuitively) nuance in color like this exercise.
Inside my copy of the Munsell Student Book. The process of laying out the color in order did more for tuning my eyes to understand color nuance than reading anything.
While this book is a little on the pricey end, the exercises help you understand color better than anything else I’ve tried. Be careful, however, it may open your eyes to a world of color you didn’t know existed!
Drawing (or painting) from observation
image credit: https://www.pexels.com/@cottonbro/
The ability to observe and translate into a drawing or painting is an enormously useful skill in your life as an artist. The gold standard of observational drawing and painting can be learned through atelier programs, where you would learn classical realism.
However, not everyone can dedicate years of their life to study in Italy (ahhhhhh, wouldn’t that be great though!?), so rest assured you can practice observational drawing and painting with any circumstance.
Working from observation simply means you are drawing/painting what you see right in front of you. The key here is to not work from a photograph, as you want to practice translating things from 3D to 2D on your own, not with the help of a camera*.
*It’s okay to draw from photographs. I do it all the time! But in the case of practicing your observational skills, working from a photo takes away from the observational benefits you get from working from life.
If you want to practice working from life, you can simply draw/paint what you are surrounded by. Your breakfast, a still life of fruit from the grocery store, a “plein air” landscape of your backyard…
Just like value studies, taking the time to draw or paint from life is a repeatable foundational skill that will serve you very well, even if you do not want to be making representational work. (Representational = A style of work that looks like the subject, usually realism/impressionism)
Rules of Perspective
Perspective is a somewhat scientific element to representational art making. It has pretty rigid rules, and again, while this can get very technical, understanding the basics can really help your drawing and painting.
Unless you are doing extremely meticulous architectural subject matter, you can usually get away with “good enough” perspective.
(This is certainly a matter of taste, but I much prefer a confident and gestural drawing that is pretty close than a technically perfect drawing lacking character. Not everyone would agree with me ;))
This book does a great job of very simply laying out the basics. It’s geared toward “urban sketchers” (artists who draw and paint in urban settings, usually quickly).
Art History
You do not need to be an art historian (I’m definitely not!!) but it can help broaden your perspective and understanding to have a basic understanding of the story of art.
Art history is a huge topic, and you can deep dive into crazy cool rabbit holes. I would recommend starting with a basic understanding of European art history, because that is pretty dominant in Western culture.
(However, I am working on gaining an understanding and deeper appreciation of Asian art and tribal art. There is so much to learn and admire about the world!)
Follow this work-in-progress pinterest board for a quick visual snapshot of major European/American phases of art history (with a small inclusion of the craziness of contemporary art in the 20th-21st centuries)
Another excellent and simple introduction to European art history is Europe 101 by Rick Steves. Steves is a travel guru and wrote this for Americans wanting to understand more of European history. He includes a section on art put so simply!
Basic Qualities of Your Chosen Medium
This part is really where you have to practice, but it does help for someone to show you. Whether acrylics, watercolors, charcoal, or oil paint interests you does not matter. Choose one (for now) and start to understand it.
Each medium looks and applies a little differently, so finding artists you admire in the medium you want to work with can help. Even then, you will find as many different approaches as there are artists.
If you are interested in learning how to oil paint, I give a run down of materials in my free mini course on oil painting supplies, as well as more in depth conversation in the course.
The FUNdamentals
This article discussed the fundamentals you use as a guide as you develop your skills as a self taught artist. There is by no means a level you must get to in order to make the art you want to make, however.
The most important thing is that you simply try and create, that you use your voice, and express yourself creatively.