The best first subjects are not the prettiest ones. They are the ones that teach a single thing. Each idea below is small enough to finish in an evening and is chosen because it drills one specific skill, so that by the eighth you can paint most of what you want to.
All of them work on a canvas board or a sheet of primed card. None of them needs more than a handful of colors.
1. One piece of fruit
A single apple, pear or lemon on a plain background. This teaches form, which is the difference between a flat colored shape and something that looks round. Put a lamp to one side so there is a clear lit side, a shadow side, and a cast shadow on the surface. Paint those three things and nothing else. Almost everything in painting is that problem repeated.
2. Color blocks with painter's tape
Tape off a grid of rectangles and fill each with a different mix. This teaches clean edges and color relationships at the same time, and it produces something genuinely worth hanging.
Two things make it work. Press the tape edge down firmly with a fingernail. And only tape onto paint that is fully dry, which with acrylic means hours rather than minutes — pulling tape off half-cured acrylic lifts it in sheets. Pull the tape back on itself at a low angle, not straight up.
3. A potted plant
A monstera leaf, a trailing pothos, a small succulent. This teaches greens, which are where most beginners come unstuck. Mixing every green from the same tube green gives you a flat painting. Mix them instead from a yellow and a blue, changing the ratio, and add a touch of red to knock back the ones meant to sit in shadow.
4. A three-band landscape
Sky, a band of field, a darker band of foreground. Nothing else. This teaches value order, the rule that makes landscapes read: things get lighter and cooler as they recede. Paint the sky first and let it be the lightest thing on the board.
5. A mug or a jar
This teaches ellipses, which every painted cup, bowl, vase and bucket depends on. The opening of a mug seen from above is a wide ellipse; seen from nearly level it is a narrow one. Draw it before you paint it, and check that both halves match.
6. A moon over water
A dark sky, a pale disc, and a broken column of light on the water beneath it. This teaches gradients and dry brushing. The reflection is not a solid line — it is short horizontal marks made with a nearly dry brush, wider and more broken as they come toward you.
7. A single feather
This teaches line control better than anything else on the list. Lay in the flat shape, let it dry, then use the tip of a small round brush to pull individual barbs out from the shaft in one confident stroke each. Hesitate and it shows immediately.
8. Anything at all, in one color
Take any subject and paint it in white plus a single dark color. This teaches value on its own, without color to hide behind. It is the least appealing exercise here and by some distance the most useful. Most paintings that feel wrong are wrong in their values, not their colors.
What you actually need
- Six colors. A warm and a cool version of red, yellow and blue, plus white, will mix nearly everything. Buy black last, if at all — mixed darks look better than tube black.
- Three brushes. A medium flat, a small round, and a detail round. More than that is not helpful yet.
- A primed surface. Canvas board or heavy card with gesso on it. Raw paper drinks the paint and goes dull, which is what gesso exists to prevent.
- Two water jars. One for the first rinse, one for the clean rinse. This single change does more for color clarity than better paint does.
- A palette you can seal. Acrylic on an open plate is unusable in twenty minutes.
Work light to dark or dark to light as the subject demands, but do let each layer dry before the next one — the logic behind that is in our guide to layering acrylic paint. And if the drawing stage is what puts you off rather than the painting, that is exactly the part a numbered canvas hands you already done. Our beginner guide covers how that first evening tends to go.
