Acrylic, and it is not close. It cleans up in water, it dries in minutes, it covers its own mistakes, it costs the least of the four, and it works on almost any surface. If you are choosing a first paint and nobody has given you a reason to choose otherwise, choose acrylic.
That said, each medium is easy at something and difficult at something else. Here is the honest version of each, so that if acrylic turns out not to suit you, you know where to go next.
Acrylic
Why it is the easiest. It is opaque, so a mistake is fixed by waiting twenty minutes and painting over it. That single property removes most of the fear from learning. It thins with water, cleans with water, and needs no solvents, so it can live on a kitchen table without ventilation problems. It sticks to canvas, board, paper, wood, fabric and most primed surfaces.
What it costs you. The speed cuts both ways. Blending is genuinely harder than in oil, because your working window is minutes rather than days. It also dries slightly darker than it looks wet, so judge a mix from a dry test swatch. And it will destroy a brush that is left with paint in it — that is the main way brushes die, not wear.
Two things not to do with it: do not thin it with turpentine or mineral spirits, which are for oil paint and will break the acrylic film, and do not paint acrylic over oil. Oil over dry acrylic is fine. The other way round will not hold.
Watercolor
What is easy. The cheapest and most portable to get into. A small pan set, one brush and a pad of paper is a complete kit, and it packs into a bag. Nothing has to dry between sessions in any meaningful sense.
What is hard. It is the least forgiving medium there is. It is transparent, so you cannot cover a mistake — you have to plan where the white paper stays white before you make a single mark, and work from light to dark with no way back. Water also goes where it likes. It rewards planning and punishes improvisation, which is the opposite of what most beginners want.
Gouache
The middle ground, and underrated for beginners. Gouache is essentially opaque watercolor. It has the water-based convenience of watercolor with the covering power of acrylic, and it dries to a flat matte finish that photographs and scans well.
What is hard. It re-wets. A new layer painted over a dry one will disturb what is underneath if you work the brush too much, so layering takes a lighter hand. It also shifts in value as it dries — darks dry lighter and lights dry darker — which takes a while to predict.
Oil
What is easy. Blending, and by a wide margin. Oil stays workable for days, so soft transitions, skin tones and skies are all far simpler than in any water-based paint. Colors stay exactly as they look wet. If your goal is a realistic portrait, oil is the easiest route to one.
What is hard. Everything around the painting. Solvents need ventilation and careful disposal. Rags soaked in oil and solvent are a genuine fire risk and need to be dried flat or stored in water rather than balled up in a bin. Drying takes days between layers, and layers have to be built with more oil in each successive one or the surface cracks later. It is also the most expensive to start.
The pastels, briefly
Soft pastel and oil pastel are drawing media that behave like painting. They are immediate and physical, with no drying time at all, which makes them genuinely easy to begin. The difficulty is that soft pastel is dusty and fragile and needs fixing and glazing to survive, and oil pastel never fully dries, so finished work cannot be stacked.
Whichever you pick
- Prime the surface. Paint sinks into raw paper or canvas and goes dull. Gesso is what prevents that, and most canvases sold today already have it.
- Fewer colors than you want. Six well-chosen colors plus white teach you mixing. Twenty-four teach you to reach for the nearest tube.
- Get the values right first. A painting with correct values and mediocre color reads fine. The reverse never does.
- Two water jars, one dirty and one clean. It sounds trivial and it is the difference between clear color and mud.
If it is the blank canvas that stops you
Plenty of people who want to paint are not held up by the paint at all. They are held up by the drawing, and by not knowing where anything goes. A numbered canvas removes that stage entirely and leaves you with the part that is actually enjoyable, using ordinary acrylics on pre-primed cotton canvas. Our beginner guide explains how a first one goes, and there are acrylic tutorials worth watching if you would rather build the skills from scratch.
