How To Choose The Best Online Painting Classes For You
The first thing you need to do when choosing the best online painting classes for you, is to understand your needs in detail. Here are the most important questions you need to ask yourself before choosing an online painting class.
#1 – How valuable is your time?
It doesn’t matter whether you are working full time and can only paint at the weekend, if you are retired and want to learn a new skill, or if painting is your career. For everyone, time is precious. It is important to find the best online painting classes that will get you started on the right track, and build on your skills in a structured way, so that you do not waste time or learn poor painting practices.
The best online painting classes will teach you everything from values, to notan and focal points, such as using the rule of thirds in art, to more advanced topics such as atmospheric perspective, the 7 elements of art, and using form to create a sense of three-dimensions in your painting, and more.
A comprehensive painting curriculum will cover all of these topics in detail:
- Brushwork
- Color
- Composition
- Concept and Focus
- Drawing – 2 Dimensions
- Form – 3 Dimensions
- Notan
- Observation of Color/Value/Form
- Processes for Painting
#2 – What level do you want to achieve?
As well as time restraints, understanding the level you want to achieve is important when you are choosing the best online painting class for you.
The best online painting classes will have not only information for beginner and hobby painters, but will also include all the information you will need to take your level to whatever level you want.
For example, you may want to sell your work, or even to make a full-time career out of painting.
If you do no know how far you will eventually want to take your art, it is best to choose online painting classes that offer you the flexibility of starting at a beginning level, but that also includes advanced topics for professional painters.
In fact, all levels of artists need the same information, from the basic principles, all the way through to more complex ideas and techniques used by the old masters. For this reason, it is best to consider this from the beginning when you are choosing the best online painting class for you.
#3 – How important is a community to you?
Painting can be frustrating at times. Most artists will tell you that it is extremely helpful to have a support group of artists to get you through your good and bad days. Whether you live in a large city, or just a small village, if you don’t have access to good art groups and schools, you will feel very isolated, and it may stop you from achieving your dreams. The best online painting classes will give you that sense of community.
When learning how to paint it is a great benefit to have other like-minded people to talk to about your successes and failures. In an active community there will be people who can point you in the right direction to help you to fix your mistakes, and applaud and encourage you when you do well. If the online painting classes you join do not have a supportive community with good feedback, you will find it much more difficult to move forward and sustain the effort needed to learn how to paint well.
Another factor when choosing your online painting community is the level of feedback you get from that community. If other students in the community are not seriously studying, it is unlikely they will be in a position to be able to offer much constructive support. This means that the quality of the online painting community is very important when choosing the best online painting classes for you.
If you are not sure, try to choose online painting classes where you can join the community for a month or two. This will give you a better idea of how the community aspect of the online painting classes actually works. It is probably one of the most important things to look out for.
#4- Do you want to sell your art?
If you want to make painting your career, or just sell your art, you need to have the skills to make works that appeal both to galleries and to private buyers.
Although beginners and less skilled artists will be able to sell their artwork, there is a lot of competition in the market and you need to make your work stand out from the crowd. Paintings that stand out from the crowd are those that show a higher level of skill. For this reason you should seek out a high quality series of online painting classes to help you reach the right level of skill.
One way to check the level of quality of your online painting classes is to look at the work and bio/resume of the instructor or person who wrote the course. Key things to look out for here are exhibitions in which the artist has participated. The quality of the exhibitions can vary greatly of course, so pay particular attention to group exhibitions in which your instructor was clearly participating in a public exhibition with other professional artists. If other professional artists exhibited together with your instructor, that this is an indication that he or she is a genuine professional and respected withing the community of professional artists.
The best online painting classes, in terms of the quality of the information, as well as the comprehensiveness of the content, will generally be created by a professional painters, rather than amateur painters.
Quite often, online painting classes you find on the internet, are created by artists whose full time job is running online art classes. Therefore, seeking out materials that have been written by a professional artist is an important factor to consider when choosing the best online painting classes. This is particularly the case now that there are so many people teaching painting on the internet.
One caveat however, is to not expect the same level of production values in the materials/videos created by professional painters. A truly professional artist will focus their effort on improving the quality and level of their own artwork, and not on creating flashy looking videos and tutorials. There is a fine line here that you need to be aware of when choosing the best online painting classes for you.
See also: oil painting for beginners
#5- Do you want to just copy other works, or do you want to unleash your own creativity?
If you want to copy paintings by other artists, go ahead. It is good to practice copying old master paintings and you will definitely learn something. However, if you want to master the underlying principles of painting, you will need to do much more than just copying other artists’ work.
In the best online painting classes, the instructors do not just have you follow along step-by-step as they paint, or give you a painting to copy.
Although this sounds like an attractive and easy way to learn, it is not. You will learn very little this way, as you will only learn how to paint that particular scene, and only in the style of your instructor. You will never be able to be fully creative and develop your own style by learning primarily in this way. Many painters who learn this way just end up being a clone of their instructor.
Instead, you have to understand the underlying principles and techniques the master artists used in their own work. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to express your own voice, and paint in your own style.
Remember that in traditional art schools and painting classes, the students copied master works for practice, but also spent many years studying the basic principles and techniques.
In fact, the majority of master painters had a structured art education, either at a traditional art academy or atelier, or they studied with a master painter in an apprenticeship relationship. There are no shortcuts. Therefore, if you want to learn to paint well, look for a structured program that will give you the equivalent training to that which the old masters had access to.
#6- How much time do you have?
It is important when you are trying to find the best online painting classes, to find one that will allow you to work at your own pace, and in your own time. If you are forced into some schedule that you can’t maintain, you will soon give up, especially if you want to go faster or slower than they allow. So choose an online painting class that has the flexibility to let you work at your own pace.
Materials you can use for your online painting classes
Some online painting classes are specific to a particular painting medium. Other online painting classes are designed more to teach the general principles of painting that apply to all media. The latter are the best online painting classes, because you can then easily switch between different media according to your preference at any time.
Here are some wikipedia links to different types of media you can use:
I suggest oil paints as they are the most forgiving. You can easily scrape of parts of the painting that are not working and start again. With the availablity of water-soluble oils these days, you do not have to worry about solvents or cleaning up. You simply thin them with water, and clean up afterwards with soap and water. Here is some more information on water soluble or mixable oils if you are interested in learning more about them.
Conclusion
So here are six factors to think about when choosing the best online painting classes for you. Have fun, and enjoy your learning!
P.S. You can get a high level overview of the Virtual Art Academy online painting classes here.
Barry, these are great questions to ask for anyone who’s shopping for online painting instruction.
I would also add these:
-How much money can you afford to spend? And what are the payment terms for the courses you’re considering?
-How effective is the instructor in teaching you how to think, rather than just how to apply paint? You need to improve your judgment as a painter.
-Is the instructor a clear and effective communicator?
-Does the instructor show competence across the genres that interest you? (e.g., landscapes, portraits, figures, still life, etc.)
-Do you like the instructor’s work? For example, if you think the instructor’s work lacks taste or uses colors you consider garish, this is obviously the wrong person for you.
-How strong is the instructor’s library of courseware and other online materials?
-Does the instructor provide learning materials in the media and formats that you prefer to learn from? (Many people like videos. But I think they’re often a waste of time because their information density is low. I would often rather read material from a well-written document.)
Thank you David, this is a good checklist for choosing online painting classes
Barry