Hey man !! I really admire your work and I'm a little stuck myself on learning art, I wanted to ask, if it's okay w/ you, where or how did you learn to paint? Not just like How you paint (that would be cool too) but where you learnt it!! Your rendering/painting style is freakin gorgeous (the colours are coolbeans as hell but what really gets me is the texture and pattern!!! its so awesome!!) and I want to learn how to paint like That but I don't know where to even start🥲
Hiya! I mostly taught myself how to paint over the past few years, but it did take me a good while (two? three years?) until I found a certain style and painting method that I really liked. While a lot of it does come from PRACTICE (I know, the dreaded empty word of art advice), it also comes from building up your own tastes and observation skills, that is to say, finding good inspiration (and STEALING IT!!). Copying your favourite artists, studying how they paint/what kinds of brushes they use, really grinding down the little things that you like about other's artworks into a technique which you can adopt helped me a lot. Anytime I make a big rendered piece I never do it without looking at other pieces with colours/composition/emotions that I wanna imitate. I use PureRef (which is free!) on desktop as a super handy reference board for all the art and photos I like !!
This also goes hand in hand with experimenting with new tools (or even different traditional/digital mediums). Funnily enough, I didn't touch traditional painting until I had gotten used to digital painting, but I was a big colour pencil kid, and I liked messing around with how they naturally and vibrantly blend. (I also dabbled in oil pastel and charcoal drawings back then, which is not particularly relevant as painting advice, but switching up mediums helped me be more loose with approaching art and things because I felt I was always learning something new).
For more general advice, I gotta say to draw for yourself and draw becos it's fun. Don't worry too much about where you have to start, so long as wherever you do, it's FUN. Because as you keep drawing you will naturally find things you'll have to target and hone down on (me, I still got a long way to go on perspective, anatomy, and backgrounds…) Learning art is by no means an instantaneous process and sometimes you're not gonna like everything you create; but I think believing in yourself and your skills are the most important. Draw what you love and you'll find, over time, a love for drawing itself.
