by robertsloan2

Created on: June 27, 2009   Last Updated: June 29, 2009

Of these three, what a beginner chooses should be the one that they like best - what moves them most. More than anything else, taking up art demands a lot of time and practice. So don't foist off a substitute medium on someone who's inspired by a particular type of painting. If they want to do Bob Ross style oil painting that's a great place to start - and it does demand the Ross formula paints because that's a very specific type of wet in wet oil painting. If instead they want to do a delicate botanical journal in watercolor - then get them started in watercolor. If they're more intrigued by Donna Dewberry and have ideas of painting their windowframes and mailboxes as well as canvases, then definitely steer them to acrylics.

Beyond that though, just looking at fine art, there are pros and cons to each of these three mediums. If you like painting and simply want to become a good painter, or you do eventually want to master all three but are wondering where to start: start with acrylics.

Acrylics are the great mimic as paints go. Like watercolors, they use plain water for cleanup. But like oils, you can alter their flow, drying time and other characteristics with special mediums, thinners and gels. You can make them function exactly like watercolors, if you use enough water and especially a flow enhancing medium. Several good books on using acrylics as watercolor will let you learn watercolor techniques using the same paint set you bought to learn painting in general. Stephen Quiller's done at least one and I know there are others.

Acrylics can also emulate oils well, especially if you get a drying retarder! Golden produces a line of acrylics that can be indefinitely reactivated using a special thinner you can add to the dry paint to make it wet and workable again. So all the oil-type wet in wet painting techniques are possible with drying retarders and Golden Interactive Acrylics.

Watercolors, especially pan watercolors, do have an advantage of portability. A pocket set of watercolors beats both oils and acrylics, if what you want is to be able to paint anywhere at a moment's notice. So this may be good to pick up even early on, most of the good manufacturers produce small half pan pocket sets with ten or twelve colors.

The real difficulty of watercolors lies in their transparency - it's hard to make corrections when you can't put light over dark. Watercolors are also hard to control. The deceptive convenience of that little pocket set can backfire if

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