The Joy of Acrylic Painting

Heart (Passion): The desire needed to prioritize learning to paint.
Hand (Skill): Specific skills and knowledge needed to paint well.
Eye (Vision): Unique ideas to create an individual painting style.

One teacher told me not to evaluate any of my paintings until I had done one hundred of them. I was so determined that I actually numbered my not-so-great paintings until I got to one hundred!
Everyone has a different learning curve, but as long as you are painting and making steady progress and learning something, that’s deliberate practice and that’s what counts.
Things to Remember

Focus on process not product.
Take the “Bird-by-Bird Approach”—one step at a time!
Paint a lot. Give yourself permission to create many, many bad paintings in order to get to the good ones. There is no other path.
Stay positive and always tell yourself you can do this.
Create a painting schedule and stick to it. Do not wait to paint until you feel creative.
Go to the studio or painting space every time you have a chance and do something, anything.

What medium you work in?
Inspiration for your work?
Where you see yourself going with your work?

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on

a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you . . . . Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Create a ritual around painting: setting up a still life, arranging your tools and paints, brewing a cup of tea. Rituals become habits.
Enjoy the process. The most frustrating day of painting should be the best thing you could choose to do with your time or go do something else. Life is short.
Don’t worry about creating a signature style. It will happen when you paint enough; it’s like handwriting.
Positive or negative feedback from well-meaning family members is probably not helpful—too much history.
Accept that not everyone will love your work. Art is subjective. The only person you have to please is yourself.
Begin to call yourself an artist; it is the first step towards believing it with your heart and soul. Never ever apologize for your work or your path, own it.
Craft an “elevator speech” for yourself so that when a stranger asks about your work you are ready. Include:
What your art is about—the subject, theme or idea?

Project 16: Paint an Imaginary Landscape

Using an inexpensive brush and acrylic gel medium,

The trick is to pare the landscape scene down to its component shapes and colors and still express the mood of the landscape.

The truth is that abstraction is actually the most difficult to do well. True abstract painting has no reference to real objects; it is a thing unto itself composed strictly with only the Elements of Art and the Principles of Design as a guide. Abstract paintings differ from abstracted paintings in that they are derived from a visual inspiration, such as a landscape or flowers, and are what most expressive painters pursue.