When I was in college, I somehow started painting. That was strange because I am not the creative type, and I have no idea why I was so drawn to it. Nevertheless, I bought some supplies and started teaching myself to paint. Since I don’t see things in my head and just put them down on canvas like actual artists do, I usually had to reference pictures or techniques for how to do it so it looked like something. As I learned more, I bought different brushes and tools (one of my favorite additions was the plastic knife to add snow to the mountains) Here, I would like to share some of my paintings from those times and how I made them without having that artistic talent and the lessons I learned along the way.
This was my second ever painting, so it’s not that great. I was looking at a picture and tried to recreate it, simplifying elements. My first picture was terrible – I paint in acrylics, so it was before I learned to brush the paint on and how to blend colors well, so it was dark and blotchy. I thought one had to paint by dabbing colors onto the canvas, almost like pixels, but I very quickly realized that this only works if your mind already knows how the painting will be composed and how those little dabs of different colors will end up in a collective image. I do not have this ability, so brushstrokes work better for me.
This Waterfall is more of a cascading stream, but that’s what I called it at the time. To paint it, I created a light blue outline for the water and the green outline for the grass. Then, I added the rocks, adding more colors to them to make them look 3-dimensional. Then, I added the white water (possibly overdoing it), covering some of the rocks so that it looks like they are under the rushing water. Lastly, I added grass and flowers on the sides, but I didn’t really know how to make them realistic, so they just look out of place. However, this is night and day compared to the first one I did, so it was progress.
I don’t really remember the order of the others I did, so I will do my best to arrange them.
One of the things I always wanted most in life was to live on Mars. I hoped to be on the first crew to set foot on Mars, and I wanted to stay there. So I wanted one of my first few paintings to be of Mars. Yes, it’s not very good, but it has meaning. I painted the sky first, probably too bright red for what it really is, but I didn’t learn to mix colors well yet. I tried to lighten it, but that was mostly in the center. Then came the ground, and the color is probably a bit off too. The hab and the astronaut were next, but I think the perspective is wrong. I also realized that the ground didn’t look right, so I tried to add some darker colors after the fact, which you can see because the darker colors go around the hab and the astronaut. This helped me learn to blend better and layer correctly.
I think this was close to the beginning as well, and it was also based on a picture or another painting I have seen. I wanted to do something in completely different colors than I normally would, so I decided to this desert scene that I could relate to somehow. The first parts were the sky and the road, then the sand on either side of the road. The clouds were added with a very small amount of paint on a big brush so that they would look wispy. I added the mesa in the background and blended it into the sand. Using the same orange colors, I added more contrast to the sand on the bottom. Then, I added the hills in the background for more dimension. The tree was last, using two colors to trace the trunk and branches, then a few shades of green for the leaves, which were dabs with the side of the brush so they had that pointy edge. At that time, it looked weird and like it was missing something, so I added more shrubs and patches of grass along the road and in the grass. I was pretty happy with this one – it looked more realistic than anything I have done so far and it’s still one of the more special ones to me.
I started feeling more confident with the brushes, so I decided to paint something for my mom. She likes palm trees, and I had this poster of a rain forest, so I wanted to make it similar to that but lighter. I started this with the background trees that were just a light green with no details, then a brighter green in the middle, and blue water in the bottom. Maybe this is common knowledge, but I learned that you need to paint a layout in basic colors of the parts you will have, like the greenery and the blue water, and add more details after. This did not come naturally to me, so that’s why I mention it. I wanted the waterfalls in the background to be a bit ethereal, like a lush, magical place, so I added some blue and pink hues to them and tried to make them look like lots of small waterfalls. Then, I added the main waterfall and the two behind it with long brushstrokes of white, as well as the whites in the pools of water. The palm trees in the foreground and the background were last, as well as the darker green grass with lighter ferns and such that grow in rain forests. I didn’t realize until I was done with the trees that it was unrealistic how big the main one was in comparison to how much water is going into it, so I probably should have added more little ones to fill the pool. I could have fixed it before I did the trees, but I didn’t want to ruin them by trying to paint something behind them.
The Milky Way is another I painted for someone else. I went on a road trip with an out-of-town friend and I showed him the Milky Way on one of the clear nights, so it was a pretty cool memory. One of the places we went to was Arches National Park, so I decided to paint the Milky Way over the most famous of the arches (Delicate Arch) as a way for him to remember the trip by. I started with a dark blue background for the sky, with a bit of lighter blue at the horizon to see the arch better, as well as the dark brown ground. Then, I painted the arch and some of the surrounding rocks. Lastly, I added the Milky Way by spraying paint from the brush (pulling it back and letting go) and the stars by lightly dabbing the point in random places. I think I should have used a finer brush for the stars though, but it was a cool experiment with stars.
I felt like I didn’t do the one for my mom well before, so I wanted to try again. This time, it was a sandy beach with palm trees. My goal was to make the palm trees more realistic, and I decided to add a sunset. I separated the painting into light blue for the sky and a slightly darker light blue for the water. I looked at pictures of how the sun sets on water (since I don’t see that on a daily basis where I live) and added the sun with the orange colors around it. Then I added the beach and the rock on the right, as well as the palm trees. I gave the palm trees more colors in both the trunk and the leaves so that they would look better. Lastly, I added some waves so it looked more dynamic.
This one is one of my favorites. I am not really a fan of how the background turned out, but I think the boat is the most realistic thing I have ever painted and I just like the overall colors. I used pictures of Hawaii to base the background on, then added the boat from referencing a separate picture, and added the rocks and vines. For the boat, I painted an outline with lighter colors on one side and darker on the other so there would be a shadow, then filled in other colors to give it dimension. For the vines, I very lightly mixed green and yellow so that it would have this variation in colors whenever I dipped the brush into it. Then the white mist was added with a soft round brush.
When I was in school, we had to memorize a lot of poems and recite them in front of the class. My grandmother still remembers many of the poems she learned in her time, but I have forgotten pretty much all of them. My favorite one and the one that stayed with me, however, was called “Зимнее утро” (“Winter Morning”) by A. S. Pushkin. This painting was inspired by that poem that I loved when I was a kid. It talks about fresh snow glistening in the morning sunlight and the author wanting to take a sleigh ride through the fields by the forest and the river. My take on it is before sunrise, when the moon is setting and you can still see the stars a bit.
My favorite part of this painting is the trees. After the sky, snow, and the background trees, which were dabs of dark blue to white, I used a thin brush to carefully trace the branches in the most random and realistic pattern I could. Then, dabbed along the branches with a light blue and then added white dabs on the side where the moon is supposed to be. Lastly, I added the blue shadows from the trees and the sleigh as I always imagined it.
After a pretty terrible depiction of the horse in the previous painting, I wanted to draw a realistic one up close. I can’t remember if I used a picture or a painting for the reference, but it looked very similar. I drew the outlines in dark brown as best as I could to match the other picture, but it didn’t go so well in some places. The left side is more protruded than it should be and the leg doesn’t look right somehow. But I really like how the mane turned out. I like doing the long brushstrokes.
I wanted to play around with reflections, so this was my was test painting for that. I made some simple clouds for the sky and a blueish color for the water. Then, I added the mountain peaks in a light purple, as if they are far away, along with some closer hills in green. I wanted to try some variation in the reflections, so I added some trees on a shoreline that was much closer, adding brown and tan for the actual shoreline. The reflections were a mix of the blue from the water and the colors I used for the hills and mountains, with some more white mixed it so they would be lighter. The lines are also not as straight since the water would ripple the image. I added some white to further distort the reflection. The foreground in the bottom right corner was probably not needed, and I probably didn’t do the reflection of the trees right. I tried to make the blue darker since it would be more shadowed, but it ended up looking a bit off. It wasn’t a bad test run though.
When my brother joined the army, he was a tanker on the M1 Abrams. He loved the tank and his job and even included it in his online nickname, M1Sokol. So I wanted to paint his tank in his memory. I wanted it to be the star of the picture, so I made the background a sandstorm by painting a bit of light blue at the very top and then an orangey-tan mixture as the background. Then, I painted the main body of the tank in tan and added the lines in grey by looking at a picture of it. The barrel came out crooked and a bit short, and some proportions are off, but I think at least the color is close to what it is. The sand it’s kicking up while driving was added last, by mixing some of the tan paint with white to make it lighter.
I wanted to work more on little details, and being obsessed with Norway at the time, I decided to try to paint the explorer Leif Eriksson on a Viking style ship. This was also by first and only painting on stretched canvas (I usually paint on canvas boards), and I don’t think it came out quite well. Turns out I probably should have learned how to paint people first, before trying to paint a ship full of them. I painted most of the sea first (except the waves in the foreground), then the boat and the people, then the foreground waves and the birds. I also used pictures of both Leif Eriksson and viking ships and combined both.
I really liked painting scenery, especially with mountains, so when I wanted to paint something for a friend, that was the first thing I thought of. I have been learning how to paint mountains with snow on them, so I wanted to incorporate that as well. First, I painted the entire canvas with light blue, then the mountain slopes in dark blue. Then, I put some white paint on the plastic painting knife and carefully went down the sides of the mountains to add snow to them. After the mountains were done, I added the trees on the left, with the different colored dabs with a round brush and some similar shrubs on the right. Then, I added the dark green evergreen trees with a fan brush – this is my first way to paint trees. Then, I painted the rocks along the shore in brown shades, as well as some white for the water hitting the shore. For a bit of foreground effect, I added the bare tree with snow on it by lightly dabbing some white on the brown branches. I was going for mountains here, but the big mountain in the background looked more like a big cliff than a mountain, so I called it Icy Cliffs.
This was a fun piece, but I don’t remember why I picked this scene. I basically stopped Finding Nemo on a cool looking scene (when the turtles were riding the East Australian Current with Nemo and Dory) and painted it.
This was another gift for a friend, but I feel bad about it. I thought of it at the last minute, so it was rushed and didn’t come out as good as I hoped. I was trying to do a slightly different variation of my favorite painting, using the plastic knife for the mountains and the fan brush for the trees.
At some point during college, when I was going through stuff, including the loss of my brother, a friend taught me Reiki and that started a somewhat of a spiritual path for me. I was never religious and never believed in deities and such, but Reiki showed me that there are various energies in the world, and they don’t have to be associated with powerful beings or anything I wasn’t comfortable with. It helped me cope and helped me heal, so it’s a huge part of my life, even if I don’t practice it regularly anymore. This painting is simple, with simple pastel backgrounds and blobs for trees, because I wanted to focus on the kanji for Reiki and evoke a peaceful image of nature that I associate it with.
I saved the best for last. This is my very favorite painting. It depicts a peaceful morning in the mountains, when a new day is just beginning. A fresh start. I started with the sky, as always, adding some pink hues at the horizon for the sunrise. Then, I painted the mountains with a dark blue-grey that got lighter toward the bottom. I used the plastic knife to add snow to the mountain slopes, creating the front ridge on the main mountain by rounded point of the knife to create an edge and doing the other side separately. This was actually my first time using the plastic painting knife, but my later attempts did not turn out as well. I think I just took more time with it the first time because I was learning – it is not something to be rushed. Then, I painted the blue hills. I wanted them to look foggy, in the distance. I used a bit of that paint to add some shadows to the mountains, which made the main ridge look even more realistic. It just kind of happened that way. Next, I added the brown hills in the foreground – I knew I wanted to add snow to them, so I wasn’t worried about the details. Then, I used my favorite fan brush to paint the trees, with dark green first, then white to add snow to the branches. I think the one on the right came out especially well. Lastly, I added some snow on the hills in the foreground and some wispy clouds. I didn’t plan to give this one away, but I did, and now I regret it since I had a falling out with that person and never got my painting back. I only have a picture of it now, but I hope to paint another like it someday.
If you have any questions about how I learned various techniques or need help, let me know in the comments. None of this came naturally to me and I had to learn everything from tutorials or reverse engineering what I saw. I also often combine several ideas into one picture and reference my own and others’ photographs a lot to build a scene. I think I got pretty decent towards the end, which is cool considering I don’t have a natural talent for it at all, so I think this is definitely possible for anyone to learn.
