5 Ways to Improve Your Art

If you’re an aspiring artist with a strong desire to improve your abilities, here are 5 things that will help you to quickly and dramatically improve your paintings.

Become Intimately Familiar With Your Colors
The only way to know how your palette of colors will look is to use them. Only then will you see what colors can be produced when colors are mixed and how the colors react when placed next to each other. Typically when mixing paint colors, mixing more than three colors together will produce a muddy dark looking color. Try mixing different colors together until you can achieve the colors you want with a mix of three or fewer colors.

Know Your Brushes
In order to create the effects you want in your art, it is essential that you know what brushes will produce the effects you are looking for. Try painting the same effect using different brushes and different brush strokes. In this way, you will know what a particular brush will do on the painting before you even start the stroke.

Understand The Support
To produce the type of paintings you desire, you must know which painting support works best for your painting style. By support I mean the material on which you will be painting. Try different types of materials and know what each material will do for your abilities. Paper absorbs differently than canvas so consequently will affect the painting stroke differently. Before starting a painting on any support, know what to expect from the material.

Get The Proper Tools
Learning to play a guitar is hard enough for any aspiring new musician. Trying to learn to play on a cheap, inferior grade of guitar is a recipe for failure. The same applies to art. If you try to learn using cheap, low quality paints, brushes, and supports, you will only set yourself up for a much harder learning experience.

Practice, Practice, Practice
The old addage that “Practice makes perfect” is one of the most misleading pieces of advice that anyone can be given. In golf, practicing the wrong way to swing a golf club will only improve your ability to do it the wrong way. You must learn the correct way to chord a guitar, to swing a golf club, and to paint. Then continually practice the correct way and your skills will improve.

Well it’s time for me to get back to work so until next time, keep your brushes clean, your colors pure, and as always, thanks for stopping by the North Forty.

Regards,

Thank you.