Brad Roemer’s Paint of Heart

Inspiration

Remember when you were little, and you had the paint-with-water books. It was just a book with little dots of paint on the page and you would take a paintbrush and create a masterpiece. After that, your parents would get you a paint-by-numbers book that simply associated a colour with a number and you would paint that colour in the designated area. After that most of us stopped colouring. What if Brad Romer told you painting can be done by anyone? Sure, we are not all going to be a Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, or Claude Monet but we can all produce art for our house and proudly display it. All you need is a few tips and a little confidence and you can produce some stunning artwork.

Supplies

To start off, make sure you have the required equipment to start painting. You can't just show up in a smock and hope the art miraculously appears on the page. You will need some brushes, tubes of paint, a pallet, canvas, and an easel. In addition to supplies, you will just need to follow the steps below.

1. Visualize - Before you ever put paint on the pallet, before you even put a brush on the canvas, take the time to visualize what you want to put and where. If you want the focus to be a house, do you want it to be up front and right in the viewers face or do you want it to seem a little far away and pull the viewer into the picture? Just a few minutes to decide can make all the difference in the world.
2. Safety first - Depending on the medium you are utilizing, some of the paints can be harmful if absorbed through the skin. In these cases, make sure to use proper personal protective equipment to safeguard yourself from this.
3. Start small - Many hobby shops have smaller canvases at a cheap price that will help you get to understand how the paint interacts with the canvas, what it takes to blend the colours, how to make better use of your space. You wouldn't start driving an F1 racing car your first day, would you?
4. Limit yourself - In conjunction with the above point, you are going to want to limit the number of colours you have on your pallet at any one time. Too many will seem overwhelming and scare you off before you even start. Start with the primary and secondary colours and go from there.
5. Paint the same thing more than once - That seems odd, doesn't it? Well, how are you going to get better at painting trees if you only do it once? Paint the same tree multiple times. Remember when you were in school and you had to write the alphabet over and over and over? This practice perfected your penmanship and painting the same thing over and over will teach you how to paint that type of thing again in the future.

Cleaning Up

That is all there is to it. Brad Roemer would like to remind you there are many community centers that have night classes that teach painting and these classes can provide more tips to develop your skills.