by Kessie Carroll

Created on: August 31, 2008

As a children's art teacher, I always start beginners off with watercolor.

Watercolors are some of the first paints we come into contact with as kids, and they're familiar and easy to work with. You get them wet, you spread them on paper. The colors run together, and accidents are encouraged, because watercolors are forgiving that way. If you are painting a sunset, and your red and yellow run together, you get fascinating streaks of orange in wonderful feathery patterns. You can't accomplish something like that on purpose!

Watercolors are so good at running together that sometimes keeping them apart is the greater challenge. This is where simple layering comes in. You paint an area and let it dry. Then you go back over it with another color and the original color shows through. You let that dry, and then paint the area beside it, slowly and carefully, to achieve a nice crisp line. Like any of the mediums, the more time you spend on a painting, the better it turns out.

Next on the difficulty meter are the acrylics: they are thicker and dry so fast that blending them is sometimes hard work. But they thin beautifully with water, and are so versatile that you can achieve both watercolor effects and oil impasto effects. Acrylics are wonderful for the bold artist who knows what they want. You lay the color on and blend it as you go. Hesitation leads to dry paint, and having to wet your colors all over again to blend them. Acrylics are pigment in a plastic binder, and once that binder is dry, you have a plastic paint surface that is impervious to water. This is nice for finished paintings, but not paintings that you are in the middle of working on.

One advantage to acrylics and how fast they dry is that you can apply layer after layer of paint, and you don't have to wait days for each to dry, like with oils. If you add enough water to each layer to make them transparent, you can achieve a glow to your painting.

Last on the difficulty meter are oil paints. They really aren't much more difficult than acrylics, but they take longer to dry, and thus are harder for children to use. Oils are better for teens and adults.

That said, oil paints are a wonderful medium, especially the new water-soluble oils. You can take your time, laying in your colors and blending them at your leisure. They are great if you're not quite sure what you are doing, and you need to experiment; you can try this or blend that, and if all else fails, you can scrape off an area with a palette knife and start over. Oils layer wonderfully, too, the main drawback being their slow drying time. It's usually necessary to wait three days to a week for a coat to dry, depending on its thickness. But patience pays off, and oil paints have been used for centuries to create beautiful works of art. Leonardo da Vinci spent more than four years on the Mona Lisa and still didn't finish it, probably because it took so long to dry. You are allowed to spend just as much time on your paintings!

In the end, time spent is what separates a beginner from an expert. The beginner wants to rush through all the stages of art production so they can have art to show off. Experts, on the other hand, take their time. Art is a meditative, right-brained activity. Slow down and enjoy it.

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