Will Kemp is a British painter and art teacher, born near Canterbury in Kent in 1977. He trained in classical portraiture in Florence on a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust award, and now runs the Will Kemp Art School, teaching the fundamentals of drawing and painting in acrylic and oil to a very large online audience.
If you have searched for acrylic painting tutorials at any point in the last decade, you have almost certainly watched one of his videos. His channel has passed 24 million views and 280,000 subscribers, which makes him one of the most widely watched painting teachers working.
Where he started
His father was a garden designer who built sand sculptures on beaches, which is a reasonable way for a child to end up thinking of making things as normal.
His own first success came at nine, when he won a set of coloring pencils on Tony Hart's BBC television show for a drawing of the Taj Mahal. Hart's shows ran a weekly gallery of children's artwork and were, for a certain generation of British children, the first indication that art was something you could actually do rather than only look at.
His training
Kemp studied fine art in Britain, then received a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust award to study classical portraiture in Florence. That matters for understanding how he teaches.
Florentine atelier training is a specific, old, fairly rigorous tradition: sight-size measurement, careful tonal drawing before color, and a lot of time spent on the same study. It is the opposite of expressive, intuitive teaching. It assumes that painting is a set of learnable skills rather than a gift you either have or do not.
He has also designed art curriculums for schools, developed interactive learning resources with the National Gallery in London, and taught in museums and schools. He has run a gallery of his own.
What he actually teaches
The thing that makes his teaching useful, particularly for someone starting late, is that he treats the fundamentals as the whole subject rather than as a chore to get past.
- Tone before color. Getting the light and dark structure right first, because a painting with correct values and approximate color reads convincingly, and the reverse does not.
- Seeing rather than knowing. Painting the shape and color actually in front of you instead of the one your brain reports. This is the single hardest habit to break and most of what "having an artist's eye" means.
- Limited palettes. Working with a small number of colors, which teaches mixing far faster than owning forty tubes.
- Acrylic taken seriously. A lot of classical teaching treats acrylic as the inferior option. He teaches it as its own medium, with its own handling, rather than as a cheap substitute for oil.
What you can take from his approach
You do not need to paint like him to learn from him. The transferable parts:
Do the tonal study first. Before any color goes down, work out where the lightest light and darkest dark sit, and place everything else between them. Most paintings that feel wrong are tonally wrong, not badly colored.
Work smaller than you want to. A finished small study teaches more than an abandoned large one.
Repeat the same subject. Painting one thing five times is worth more than five things once. This is the part beginners skip and the part that produces actual improvement.
Separate the two problems. Painting asks you to solve technique and composition at the same time, and doing both at once is why first attempts are discouraging. Anything that removes one of them for a while is useful.
Can you learn this way?
Realistically, yes, up to a point. Free online teaching genuinely covers the fundamentals now in a way it did not fifteen years ago, and Kemp is one of the reasons.
What video cannot do is look at your canvas and tell you what is wrong with it. That is what an in-person tutor provides and it is the honest limit of learning this way. Most people get considerably further than they expect before that limit matters.
If you want other teachers worth following, we put together a list of the best YouTube channels for learning acrylic painting, all free.
If the blank canvas is the problem
There is a gap between watching a tutorial and knowing what to do on a blank canvas on a Tuesday evening, and it stops a lot of people before they start.
A paint by numbers kit removes the composition and color-mixing decisions entirely and leaves you the brushwork, which is a reasonable way to build hand skills and confidence with a brush before facing an empty canvas. Ledgebay's designs are original artwork licensed from working painters, and there is a custom option made from your own photograph if you would rather paint something personal.
Neither is a substitute for the kind of study Kemp teaches. They are a way of getting a brush in your hand often enough that the study becomes worth doing.
Common questions
Is Will Kemp's teaching free?
A large amount of it is, on his YouTube channel and website. He also sells structured courses.
Does he teach acrylic or oil?
Both. His acrylic material is the better known, but his training is in classical oil portraiture.
Is he a good starting point for a complete beginner?
Yes. His material is built for people with no background, which is unusual for someone with atelier training.
Where can I find his work and courses?
Through the Will Kemp Art School website and his YouTube channel.
