Learning to Oil Paint

Confession time, I’ve always wanted to be an artist. But when I was younger, there were a lot of other kids in school who were “better” than me. They had more natural talent and were encouraged to keep drawing and making more art by the adults (while I was encouraged to go back to licking glue sticks and being quiet). Now that I’m older, and I’ve realized that “talent” matters so much less than effort and practice, I decided to get back into it and try to learn how to paint.

Kevin Murphy, the artist behind Evolve, has over the years developed a fool-proof program that can teach anyone to paint (and paint well). I was super impressed by the portraits shown on the website, and surprised to hear that most of them were painted by high school students with only a few months of instruction. I was sold and am so happy that I decided to join! It’s been a great experience over the last year learning how to paint and I’m very proud and excited about how far I’ve come. Below are some details about the program and my journey thus far.

The main course you buy access to consists of four “blocks”. Each block consists of twenty assignments. For each assignment, you watch the instructional videos and then complete the painting. You then upload a picture of your painting, along with pictures of your reference and under-drawings to a website where Evolve instructors take a look give you feedback on it within twenty four hours. The instructors are all very engaging and always gave critical feedback that helped me in the following paintings, along with words of encouragement.

In one of the first videos, Kevin says that all paintings can be broken down into three things: Edge, Value, and Color. Blocks 1 and 2 build up your expertise controlling edge and value, leaving blocks 3 and 4 to add color into the mix.

You literally start by painting squares on a canvas. The course assumes no prior art education or experience and builds you up by teaching fundamentals and then building on those gradually over the block. Each painting is a bit harder than the one before it and you learn a new skill or enhance your understanding of one you’ve already learned by practicing it.

Block 2 is focused on proportional drawing, and instead of tracing a provided under-drawing, you setup a still life on your own and draw it yourself. For me, this was the hardest to learn. What helped me was realizing that what they’re teaching you in the course isn’t actually a way to draw, but rather a way to check your drawings and square them against what you’re seeing with your eyes. I think the only way to get better at drawing is to just practice, but now I have a way to check my work and feel that with enough time and a big enough eraser I can draw anything 🎉

Timelines are weird and you move through the course at your own pace, so it’s hard to say how long all this should take. Between my day job and my night job teaching at Sinclair, I usually only paint on the weekends. Most of the paintings took 2-4 hours to complete, but towards the end of block 2 I would spend 2-4 hours doing the drawing and then 4-6 hours painting. The final painting of the skull took me the longest. I spent two weekends drawing it and then another two weekends painting it. That one was a big stretch for me though and wasn’t typical. I’m now halfway through the course and it took me almost exactly a year.

I’m looking forward to diving into color paintings and completing the course! My goal is to be able to paint portraits. When I started, that seemed like a very lofty, unobtainable goal, but now I can see a path there and can’t wait to do it! If you’re interested in painting too, know that you absolutely can and in my opinion, Evolve is the way to go. You can also look for one of their in-person schools across the country that teach the same curriculum at The Art Academy. One of the students has been documenting her journey on YouTube and it has been super helpful for me to watch along and see how she approached paintings I've been doing too.

Check out my progress below and follow me on Instagram if you'd like to see more!

We started out just using 4 flat colors, using edge to suggest shape.

We then learned how to blend colors together and paint gradients.

The next major item was learning how to paint reflections and highlights.

The final painting in block 1, putting all of the techniques together to paint a pumpkin (the cloth was so much harder to paint than the pumpkin!).

I did two paintings with this coffee cup and it was so hard to get right!

It took a long time to get the drawing right, but using the skills learned in the videos, I was able to adjust and iterate on my sketch until the proportions matched what I was seeing in the light box.

That damn coffee cup again!

This one was quite the stretch for me... There are parts of this I like and am proud of, and other parts, not so much 😬

Thanks for looking at all of these!