How to Get Better at Painting: What to Practice When You Feel Stuck

"How do I get better at painting?" is the question I get most, and the honest answer is boring: paint more. The useful answer is what to paint more of, because most people practice the part they are already good at and then wonder why nothing moves.

I am completely self-taught, so everything below is what worked on me rather than a curriculum. If you want the lessons that shaped my own work over the years, those are in 15 Tips That Changed My Paintings Forever. This article is the other half: what to actually sit down and practice.

Getting better is not one skill

When a painting is not working, people usually say they need to get better at painting. That is like saying you need to get better at sport. There are about six separate skills in there, and they improve separately:

• Seeing. Proportion, shape, what is actually in front of you instead of the symbol your brain has stored for it.
• Value. How light or dark something is. This one carries more of the picture than color does.
• Color. Mixing what you meant, and making colors sit next to each other without turning to mud.
• Composition. Where things go, what size they are, where the eye travels.
• Material control. Knowing exactly what each tool does, dry and wet, over and under everything else.
• Finishing. Edges, final details, and the ability to stop.

Give yourself an honest score out of five for each. The lowest number is what you work on next month. Almost nobody does this, because the lowest number is also the least fun one.

Why you are stuck

Plateaus are almost always the same thing: you are repeating finished work you are comfortable with. Making another piece in your usual way is production, not practice. It keeps your current level in good shape and adds nothing to it.

Practice means isolating one thing and letting the rest be ugly. A page of value studies is allowed to look terrible. It is not a painting, it is a rep.

Drills that actually move something

• Three value studies, 20 minutes. Take any photo and paint it in three greys only: light, middle, dark. No color, no detail. Do this ten times and your paintings will look more solid without you knowing exactly why.
• The same object five times. One object, five angles, from life. Not five different objects. The repetition is what teaches you, and by the fourth one you stop drawing the symbol and start drawing the thing.
• Master copies. Copy a painting you admire, to learn, never to sell or pass off as yours. You will find out in twenty minutes why the composition works, which is faster than reading about it for a year.
• Three colors and white, for a week. A limited palette forces mixing, and mixing is where color understanding actually comes from. Full paint sets let you avoid the entire lesson.
• Six thumbnails before the piece. Two minutes each, matchbox sized, no detail. You are testing where the big shapes sit. The sixth one is usually better than the idea you walked in with.
• A test sheet per material. One page per tool: what it looks like thick, thin, over dry paint, under a marker, on top of varnish. Boring, and it prevents more disasters than any other habit I have.
• Draw the gap, not the object. Negative space, or a reference turned upside down. Both switch off the part of your brain that names things, which is the part that lies to you about what a hand looks like.

Twenty focused minutes of one of those beats two hours of touching up something that was already finished.

Value beats color, every time

If one thing on this list changes your work fastest, it is this. I stopped asking "what color is this" and started asking "how light or dark is this". A tree can be purple with pink highlights and still look believable, as long as the values are right. Unrealistic color is not the thing that makes a painting look wrong. Wrong values are.

Test it by photographing your work in black and white. If the whole thing turns into one grey mush, the drawing was never the problem.

Finish things, and finish them small

A finished piece teaches you things a sketchbook never will: how to keep a thing alive through the ugly middle stage, how to recover from a mistake, when to stop. Sketches let you quit at the exact moment the lesson starts.

Small formats make this survivable. Most of my originals are 15 by 15 centimeters. A small panel is finishable in a realistic amount of time, which means more finished pieces, which means more lessons per month.

How to tell you are improving

You will not feel it. Improvement feels like your work getting worse, because your taste improves before your hands do and you start seeing everything that is off.

• Photograph everything you finish. Compare across six months, never across a week.
• Write one line per piece. What you fixed, what you would do differently. Four months of those lines is a map of your own weak spots.
• Ask better questions. "Do you like it" gets you nothing. "Where does your eye go first" and "what looks unfinished to you" get you something you can use.
• Count your finished pieces. Not hours, not intentions. Finished things.

Practicing with an ADHD or autistic brain

Most practice advice assumes you can sit down daily at the same time and enjoy a routine. If that were my situation I would have a very different shop.

• Lower the starting cost. Materials stay out, on the table, ready. Every step between you and the first mark is a place to lose the whole session.
• Make the unit tiny. One square centimeter. One thumbnail. Ten minutes. The point is starting, and starting is the expensive part.
• Rotate on purpose. Several pieces open at once, so switching is a plan instead of a failure.
• Put the novelty in the drill, not in the project. New material, new subject, new constraint, same small format. You get the fresh hit without abandoning another half finished canvas.
• Use the same ritual to end. Varnish, sign, stamp, photograph. A fixed ending makes finishing feel like a procedure rather than a decision.

More about how my own brain shapes the work is in Being an Autistic and ADHD Artist.

Four things you can stop worrying about

• Talent. What looks like talent from outside is almost always a head start plus volume.
• Expensive materials. Decent materials remove frustration, they do not add skill. Past a basic level, the tool is not what is holding you back.
• Your style. It arrives as a side effect of volume. Chasing it directly makes it run away. The long version is How to Find Your Art Style, and if you are still deciding which direction to work in, Which Art Style Suits Me? goes through the options.
• Neatness. Visible brushwork is not a flaw, which I argued properly in Why Rough Painting Can Still Be Good Art.

A four week plan, if you want one

• Week 1, seeing. One object a day from life, ten minutes. Same object all week if you like.
• Week 2, value. Three value studies from photos, three times this week, twenty minutes each.
• Week 3, color. Three colors and white. Mix everything. Nothing straight from the tube.
• Week 4, composition and one finished piece. Six thumbnails, pick one, take it all the way to varnish.

That is roughly four hours of work across a month and it will do more than another four paintings in your usual way.

Which of my guides is for which problem

I wrote my own systems down as four digital guides, all instant PDF downloads. They are written from a loud, dense, mixed media practice, so if you paint big, bright and busy they will feel like they were made for you. If you work quiet and minimal they still apply, the examples are just very pink.

• Why Does My Art Feel Off? is for the staring phase. You finished a piece, something is wrong, and you cannot name it. It is a diagnostic route: what to check, in what order, and what each symptom usually means.
• The Candy Decay Color System is for maximalist painters. If you want twenty colors in one picture and they keep going muddy or shouting over each other, this is the one. Neon, high saturation, glow without neon paint, and how to keep it all in one family.
• The Candy Decay Composition System is for people who fill the whole surface. Busy pictures need a route for the eye more than empty ones do. This is how a crowded painting stays readable instead of turning into noise.
• The Strangest Guide to Finding Your Art Style is for the in between phase. A folder full of work that looks like six different people made it, and a drawer of materials with no clear jobs. It is about reading your own archive and giving each tool one task.

All four together are the Candy Decay Art Guide Library for 29.99 euro instead of 42.96 euro, which is the sensible option if more than one of those descriptions sounded like your week.

None of it replaces the reps. It just means fewer of them are wasted.