The reason I'm including this section is only because I did a lot of research before beginning painting, only to find out that everything I found online about how to paint and mix colors is completely and horribly wrong. And I think that's it's terribly unfair and elitist to not have any useful information out there. It's not jsut about painting, that goes for anything. If you've ever tried to find real information on the Internet, then you probably know all you've ever found is useless junk. That's because everyone only sees everyone else as dollar signs and expects you to be a part of the system and pay out the ass to get any information at all. And even when you do pay out the ass to go to school for something, the information there is just barely adequate, because the world doesn't want anyone to be more than mediocre. No, I'm not saying I'm great - far from it - I don't think I'm good at all, but at least I think everyone deserves to hear the truth about things and to find complete, accurate information on the Internet.

So, with that said, forget everything you ever knew about color. Red and yellow doe snot make orange. Ok, red and yellow will make orange with a LOT of mixing, but other color combinations don't work out. Blue and yellow does not make green, and red and blue does not make purple. When mixing paints (I'm working with acrylic, by the way), any two given colors mixed together makes an ugly, unusable shade of pukey brown. Mixing color just doesn't work in the way you'd think or expect. Nor does anything in the "how to mix color" pages I've seen actually work. And it is ok to mix colors with white. It doesn't dull the color of the Acadamy acrylics I'm using, as the other sites will try to tell you. Mixing color is not about what you think, know or have ever been taught. Mixing color must be learned through experementation and observation of real life. You have to go out and look closely very closely at things and see what other colors are there. For example, when you look at the pavement of the road close enough, it's not just grey, but there's a hint of brown in there. There's a hint of other colors within the color of everything around you. When you are able to see the hidden colors in things, and only then, you will be able to mix your paint colors. That's seriously the only way it works.

Secondly, acrylics don't dry out in 2 nanoseconds like the other how-to-paint sites will have you believe. They do dry fast, but you have a few minutes to work with. I'm not using a pallate (sp?) of any kind either. I just started using these Chinese food containers lined with plastic wrap, and they're apparantly air-tight because I can leave a painting for several days, come back to it and my paints are still as wet & workable as if I'd just squeezed them from the tube. I guess you just gotta find yourself a Chinese delivery place that uses these little air-tight plastic containers.

Beyond that, I sketch my ideas out first, then on the canvas paper. I sketch it very lightly and just the basic shapes for guidelines, and then follow my paper sketches for the details while painting. Drawing it out completely first helps me get comfortable with the image since my drawing ability hasn't improved since I was 6 years old, so the first step is proving to myself that I'm able to draw the scene in a reasonably so that other people would be able to recognize what my child-like scribblings are supposed to be.

And most of all, if you're lke me and can't draw but want to paint, just do a search for "Outsider Art" on eBay and see how sloppy a lot of those look. I was worried (and to some degree still am) about not being able to paint photo-reallistic scenes, witht he crisp lines and sharp details that you'd see in a photo taken with a digital SLR camera - that's how much of a perfectionist I am and how hard I and other people are on me. I'm used to having 1000% absolute perfection expected of me - and always falling horribly short of everyone else's standards, of course I'm sensitive about not being able to paint those photo-reallistic details and sharp lines like you'd expect of a high resolution photo. But a lot worse passes for art. Sometimes the paint is just splatted on and it's considered a great work of art. I don't get it and I don't claim to. So I've got my friends telling me that they could enver paint anything, and that's BS, because anyone can. It doesn't have to be as crisp and clear and as detailed as a photo.