Paint

"The program or the physical gloopy art stuff?"

Paint, as many people know, comes in different types, packets and of course colours. This is your quick guide to the many different types of paint that is out there in the world.

1. Oil Paint - This is a thick and slow drying paint with a strong colour. It is great for pieces that includes plenty of colour and even better for textured paintings. However, oil paint can be expensive and they are not the best paint for beginners.
   
2. Water-colour Paint - These are can be much thinner paints compared to oil paints (it does depend if you have a pallet of water-colours or tubes of them, depending on the thickness and intensity of the colour). They can be great for their colour, even though you have to mix most of them yourself. Water-colour paint is one of the best for quick, slightly rough painting, and is one of the best paints to use for landscapes.
   
3. Poster Paint - Poster paint is the best for children as it dries relatively quick, it's cheaper than all other paints and you can have lots of fun with it without worrying about it going everywhere. It doesn't have the strongest of colours, nor textures, which is makes it best for kids.
   
4. Acrylic Paint - This paint is my favorite and I personally use it all the time. It is not the most expensive of the paints, and produces some wonderful colours. It doesn't take half as long to dry as oil paints do. Acrylic paints are the best for young artists, GCSE and A level students, or anyone who has art as a hobby.  These paints also come in one of the widest variety of colours that you could possibly see and with every company, there is a slightly different shade, creating even more shades. This paint is also the best to experiment with. I shall emphasize this again and again, acrylic paint is fabulous.
   
5. Printing Paint - This paint is used for many different things, of which includes monoprinting. This is a very slow drying paint (not as fast as acrylic, but not as slow as oil!). It allows you to paint a lot of detail or a large surface without drying, so you can press on to it and still get the whole pattern. It is easy to mix and not one of the well known types of paint. It is the best to do monoprinting with.
   

Photo vs Life

There are artists who sit in studios and use reference photos and then there are artists who sit outside and paint the world in front of them

Real vs Gaming

I personally use reference photos to draw from as I have had many times where I have simply been too slow and careful with my work that my subject or scene has simply gone. For example sunsets disappear so quickly that you cannot capture the true beauty of it if you are a slow artist, just like me.

Ricardo Garduno draws from reference photos

With reference photos you can also easily draw grids to check things such as positioning and proportion. I draw lots of people such as actors and singers (my most recent piece is on One Direction) and to get the proportion of the faces, the position of the eyes, lips and nose just right, I use a grid. Not everyone likes using a grid though as some people draw it on too hard and then cannot get rid of the evidence when they complete the drawing itself. Some people also struggle with grids and photos compared to painting or drawing from life because they cannot see the 3D of the world in a photo. Artists sometimes prefer to sit outside the same time repeatedly till they compete a painting or a drawing of a landscape or even a person.

Rob Pointon paints from real life

Life can be difficult though, unless you are a quick artist. The world moves so quickly and yet so slowly that the moment can be gone within seconds. Doing art from life however can also have its benefits as you can compare the piece of art to the real thing or even get the correct colour by simply comparing it there and then. Doing art from life also gives artists the opportunities to show of their work and their process of their art as almost free advertising.

There are four types of artists in the world. Ones that like to draw from pictures. Ones that like to draw from real life. Ones that like to draw free hand or from memory. And ones who really don't care.