There is something intriguing about a painting medium whose essential ingredient is an egg. Yes, an ordinary egg.
How can something from the kitchen become the binder for a painting that lasts for centuries?
As an acrylic painter, I’m also interested in what happens when familiar painting habits meet unfamiliar materials. I usually encourage beginners to simplify the subject and resist reaching for a tiny brush too soon. Yet I wanted to explore the patient layering and fine brushwork associated with tempera.
Last week, I had the amazing opportunity to work in a small-group workshop in Zennor, Cornwall with the fantastic British painter Antony Williams.
James McNeil Whistler, Nocturne Blue and Silver – Chelsea, 1871, Oil paint on wood
After visiting the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britan, the Nocturne series really captivated my attention, and I thought it would be an interesting subject for looking at compressed tonal ranges.
For this study, I’m going to use a grey tear-off palette rather than white. This will give us a more neutral reference when mixing our colours, making it much easier to judge how light or dark each mixture really is.
If you’ve been learning to draw and feel like you’re not getting anywhere, it’s very easy to assume you simply don’t have the talent for it.
But in my experience, talent is rarely what holds you back.
More often, it comes down to how you’re practising, what you’re expecting from yourself, and whether you’re giving your eye enough time to catch up with your hand.
Here are seven of the most common reasons why beginners fail at drawing.
1. Never actually starting
This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly common.
You buy a new sketchbook. You sharpen the pencils. You watch a few tutorials, save some reference images and spend half an hour deciding whether you really need a 2B or a 4B.
And somehow, no drawing actually happens.
There’s a feeling that if you can just get the right materials, understand the technique a little better or find the perfect subject, you’ll be more prepared.
But drawing doesn’t really work like that.
Your first few drawings are supposed to feel awkward. You’re learning a new visual language and your hand hasn’t caught up yet. You’ll make the same mistakes over and over and get frustrated at your lack of progress. That’s 100% normal.
The sketchbook only becomes useful once it has marks in it.
2. Quitting too soon
One of the strange things about learning to draw is that your taste often develops faster than your ability.
You can look at your drawing and immediately see that something isn’t quite right, but you don’t yet have the skills to fix it.
That gap can be frustrating.
Someone might spend three weeks drawing, compare their work with an artist who has been practising for twenty years and decide, “I’m just not very good at this.”
But three weeks is hardly any time.
When students send me a drawing from when they first started alongside something they’ve made a year later, the difference can be enormous.
You just have to keep drawing long enough to see it your progress
3. Not doing enough drawings
We can become very precious about a drawing.
You choose a nice sheet of paper, carefully measure everything out and then spend hours trying not to make a mistake.
But you often learn much more from ten quick drawings than you do from one drawing you’re frightened of ruining.
Small studies are brilliant for this.
Five-minute sketches. Value studies. Simple shapes. Drawing the same object from three different angles.
You’re removing some of the pressure and increasing the number of visual problems you have to solve.
And that’s really what practice is.
The more drawings you make, the less important any individual drawing becomes.
Mistakes stop feeling like failures and start becoming useful information.
4. Not drawing consistently enough
A long drawing session every couple of weeks can feel productive, but shorter and more regular practice is usually much more useful.
Drawing relies heavily on observation, and your memory for learning relies on the forgetting curve.
You’re training yourself to notice angles, proportions, shapes, values and relationships that you might previously have ignored.
And by drawing regularly, you stop yourself having to relearn everything from scratch.
There’s nothing wrong with being curious, but beginners can sometimes jump between subjects and materials so quickly that they never stay with one problem long enough to understand it.
If you spend a few weeks drawing simple still lifes, for example, you begin to recognise the same problems appearing again and again.
How wide is this compared with that?
What angle is that line?
Where is the darkest dark?
Why does my ellipse look out?
That repetition is incredibly valuable.
You don’t need less enthusiasm. You just need to focus it for a little longer.
6. Only choosing subjects you know you can draw
There’s a balance here.
You don’t want every drawing to feel impossible, but you also don’t want to spend all your time repeating things that already feel comfortable.
A slightly more difficult subject forces you to look harder.
Perhaps you normally draw single objects, so you try a simple still life.
Perhaps you always work small, so you make a larger drawing.
Perhaps you avoid hands because they look complicated, so you spend a week drawing nothing but hands.
You don’t need a huge leap.
Just choose something that feels slightly beyond where you are now.
7. Drawing what you think you see
This might be the biggest one of all.
When beginners draw an eye, they often draw their idea of an eye.
When they draw a tree, they draw their symbol for a tree.
A cup becomes two parallel sides with an oval on top because that’s what we know a cup looks like.
But drawing improves when you stop naming things and start looking at shapes.
Instead of thinking, “I’m drawing a nose,” you start noticing the angle of one edge, the shape of the shadow underneath it and how far it sits from the eye.
Instead of drawing a tree, you notice the particular silhouette of that tree.
This is why drawing can feel surprisingly difficult at first.
You’re not really learning how to move a pencil.
You’re learning how to see.
Most of the skills that make someone “good at drawing” aren’t mysterious gifts. They’re habits of observation that can be practised as a learnable skill.
Keep turning up, keep looking carefully and keep making drawings.
The improvement often happens more quietly than you expect.
What should you work on next?
You might be reading through this list and nodding along, recognising yourself in one or two of these points.
But that still leaves the difficult question: what should you actually work on next?
That’s where a structured course can be so useful.
Not because it will magically turn you into a drawing master, but because it gives your practice a clear direction. It helps you know what to focus on, what to practise, and in what order, so that good habits can form and your knowledge, confidence and skills can build on each other.
You still have to do the drawing.
But instead of wondering whether you’re practising the right thing, you have a path to follow.
And often, that little bit of structure is what turns good intentions into real progress!
In many of my paintings, I’ll often start with just a couple of colours and perhaps one brush.
Yet if you look at the materials list I ended up using, you’ll see a much larger range.
And that process of how I got there can be slightly misleading.
It can look as though I sat down before starting the painting, carefully selected the perfect palette, laid all the colours out and then simply followed the plan.
That usually isn’t what happened.
The materials list is a record of the colours I discovered I needed during the painting journey.
If I repainted the same subject again from scratch, I may take a slightly different route, based on what I learnt. I might find I don’t need one of those colours at all. I might discover that a mixture I struggled with could have been achieved much more simply.
I often finish a painting on the first attempt and think:
Why on earth did I start with that colour?
But that is part of the process.
Building without predicting
It reminds me of an article Derek Sivers wrote about when designing an off-grid house in New Zealand.
His idea was essentially building without predicting. (You can read the article here: Building Without Predicting)
Rather than designing a house around everything he imagined he and his son might possibly need, they started by living very simply in a bare cabin.
Then they added things when they discovered they actually needed them.
I love that idea.
We took a similar approach when renovating our house and studio. We lived in it for a year before making some of the bigger decisions.
That meant we could follow the seasons. We could see where the morning light came through in Winter, where we naturally sat in Summer, which rooms we actually used and where we tended to end up during the day.
Instead of trying to predict how we would live in the house, we let living in the house tell us what it needed.
A comment at the end of Sivers’ article particularly struck me. He described a neighbour visiting and being horrified by some of the choices they had made.
A neighbor came by for the first time and really hated it, getting all upset and yelling, saying I was crazy for not having his preferred comforts. I love that this home feels wrong for others, and just right for us – Derek Sivers
His conclusion was essentially that he loved the fact the house felt wrong for someone else, but exactly right for them.
And I think there’s something really useful in that when developing a colour palette.
Your palette doesn’t have to look right to somebody else.
Developing a personal palette
There’s a temptation when painting to think there must be a correct palette.
You see another artist using Burnt Umber, Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Red and Titanium White, so you feel as though you should have those colours too.
Or you look at the reference and think:
There’s a bright red there, so I need a bright red.
There’s a pale colour there, so I need white.
There’s green in the landscape, so I need a green.
But you might not.
A palette should develop from the problems the painting actually presents.
Not from the problems you imagine it might present. And that leads to a really useful painting exercise.
Start with one colour
Find a subject you’d like to paint.
Then choose one colour.
Not five colours.
Not your normal palette.
One.
Start painting and see how long you can survive with it. Really push it, thin it, use it thickly, let the colour of the ground show through, change the pressure of the brush, scrub it in.
Use the paint opaquely in one area and almost like a stain somewhere else.
Your aim isn’t to produce a perfect finished painting with one colour; your aim is to discover the exact moment when the painting genuinely asks you for something else.
A palette developed by questions
Before adding another colour, ask another question.
Suppose you reach an area that needs to be lighter.
Your immediate reaction might be: I need white.
But do you?
Could you thin the paint and allow the lighter ground underneath to create the light?
Could you leave that area unpainted?
Could you make the surrounding shapes darker instead?
A colour doesn’t exist independently; it alters enormously depending on what surrounds it.
So sometimes the answer isn’t another tube of paint.
The answer is changing the relationship between the colours you already have.
Limitations make you notice more
This is where a limited palette becomes much more than a colour-mixing exercise.
If you have twenty colours sitting next to you, every problem can appear to have the same solution:
Reach for another tube.
Take those options away, and you have to become more inventive. You start paying much closer attention to value and notice how dark one shape really is compared with another. You become more sensitive to warm and cool relationships, and to how much paint thickness can affect colour.
You also become more aware of the surface underneath. Your brush handling improves because you’re trying to make the same paint behave in several different ways, rather than immediately reaching for another tube.
Perhaps most importantly, you start looking at the painting as a whole. Rather than asking, What colour is that object? You start asking, what does this area need in relation to everything around it?
I think that’s a much more useful question.
The finished palette is evidence, not instructions.
So when you look at one of my course materials lists and see six, eight or ten colours, try not to think of them as the recipe for the painting. Think of them as a record of the decisions I made while working through several versions of the piece.
I will have made a few small colour studies and swapped brands to get the right hue. I might have started with a couple of colours, then encountered a problem that made me introduce another. A mixture could have almost worked, but needed something slightly cooler, so another colour found its way onto the palette.
By the end, there’s a finished palette sitting there.
‘To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.”
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler (1834- 1903) was a remarkably modern painter for his time. His paintings are carefully designed, tonal and strikingly contemporary.
Opinionated, rebellious and a natural showman, Whistler helped prepare the way for abstraction. His opposition to the art establishment was both part of his genius and, ultimately, part of his downfall.
I’ve always had a particular fondness for Whistler, and living in St Ives means I’m often reminded of him whenever I walk past the house where he lodged, overlooking the sea, now known as Whistler’s View. In January 1884, Whistler came to St Ives with his pupil and studio assistant Walter Sickert, along with the artist Mortimer Menpes.
Tate Britain, London, has the first major European exhibition of Whistler’s work in 30 years, a retrospective devoted to the American-born artist. It brings together his world-famous portraits and nocturnes, alongside rarely or never-seen works, and I was fortunate enough to catch it last week.
This is a simple, easy-to-follow downloadable video course with over 4 hours of tuition.
It’s a one-time payment with lifetime access to the lessons.
The course is a self-study video course for beginners exploring Van Gogh’s palette, methods and techniques. It has been designed as a step-by-step, rounded learning experience that brings together all my knowledge as a student, painter, and teacher.
What’s in the Course?
1 x Van Gogh-inspired Sunflowers painting from start to finish, based in the studio, working from a reference image.
13-lesson curriculum: Downloadable Video Lessons (with lifetime access to these recordings)
Step-by-step acrylic painting lessons that you can follow at your own pace.
A clear, easy-to-follow process for building the painting in stages.
A drawing template to help you overcome the blank canvas and get started with confidence.
LIFETIME ACCESS to video lessons, download on separate devices, keep forever.
Over 4+ hrs of detailed video instruction.
(I demonstrate the course with acrylics, using gels and thicker paint to create texture, but you could also adapt the approach to water-mixable oils or traditional oils if you prefer.)
In this course, we’ll observe one of the most expressive painters in art history: Vincent van Gogh.
Best known for his bold use of colour, thick impasto brushwork, and paintings filled with emotion and movement, Van Gogh transformed simple subjects into something unforgettable.
And few subjects capture that better than his Sunflowers.
Van Gogh painted his Sunflowers series after moving to Arles in the South of France in 1888. It was a period of hope, ambition, uncertainty, and intense creative energy. He was searching for his own voice as an artist, and in these paintings we can see his brushwork becoming looser, his colour choices bolder, and his style more personal than ever before.
I’ve chosen this particular version of the Sunflowers, ‘Three Sunflowers in a Vase‘ because it beautifully captures the warmth, optimism, and intensity of that moment.
At first glance, it looks like a simple vase of flowers.
But when you look closer, there’s so much to learn.
Thick paint. Directional marks. Broken edges. Subtle yellows. Muted greens. A background that shifts and glows. Brushstrokes that don’t just describe the subject, they become part of the experience.
You’ll learn how to build a painting in stages, starting with a simple grid drawing and moving through the background, tabletop, vase, leaves, and sunflower heads.
We’ll look at how Van Gogh used colour relationships to create impact, how small areas of contrast can bring a painting to life, and how to use thicker acrylic paint and gels to suggest the texture and energy of impasto brushwork.
If you’re unsure of your drawing, no worries. We use a simple grid method to help keep everything in proportion and make the subject feel much more approachable.
And if you’ve ever looked at Van Gogh’s paintings and thought, “I’d love to paint with that kind of freedom, but I wouldn’t know where to start,” this course will guide you through it step by step.
So grab a brew, maybe a straw hat, and let’s paint Vincent’s Sunflowers!
Is this course for me?
“I’m not good enough.”
Van Gogh often felt the same way. He compared himself to other artists, questioned his abilities, and struggled to achieve what he saw in his mind. Yet he kept painting. Every brushstroke was a step forward.
“I’ve left it too late.”
Van Gogh didn’t dedicate himself fully to art until he was 27. Art doesn’t ask when you started. It asks whether you’re willing to start.
“What if I never develop my own style?”
Your style isn’t hiding somewhere waiting to be discovered. It grows through practice. Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers weren’t the beginning of his journey. They were the result of years of observation, experimentation, and changing. The same process is available to every artist who is willing to pick up a brush and begin.
“I don’t know if I have talent.”
Talent is overrated. Before you write yourself off, ask yourself a different question: have you actually given yourself the chance to learn? Van Gogh certainly didn’t look like a genius when he started. His early drawings were awkward, his paintings were dark and heavy. Most people decide they don’t have talent long before they’ve given themselves enough time to improve.
This course isn’t about proving you’re talented. It’s about discovering what happens when you stop judging yourself and start painting.
And in that moment, before any colour hits the canvas, the painting is perfect.
Not because it’s complete but because it’s got potential.
Nothing has gone wrong. There are no mistakes to fix. The best work you’ve ever made might be a few brushstrokes away.
Then you start to add the first touches of colour.
It’s genuinely exciting; you’re making decisions. Things are beginning to take shape, and as the painting progresses, you’re feeling confident.
And then, somewhere in the middle, it happens.
The ugly stage arrives.
A Series of Stages
A painting is not created all at once. It develops through a series of stages, and almost every stage temporarily sacrifices one quality, in order to build another.
You lose simplicity to gain structure.
You lose freshness to gain form.
But this stage, this stage feels like everything has hit you at once.
“During Lesson 2, my son was saying how ugly his work looked, but as we later sat on the couch and looked at his painting… it looked so good! Haha.”
I love this so much. Not just because it’s a lovely image, the three of them on the sofa, looking at the painting with fresh eyes, but because it captures something I genuinely believe is one of the most important things to understand about making art.
The Obstacle is the Way
There’s a coding school in Paris called 42, founded by French entrepreneur Xavier Niel.
Applicants spend weeks working through problems they’ve never encountered before. They’re given challenges that leave them stuck. The school isn’t testing whether someone can code. It’s testing what happens when they hit a wall.
Do they keep going?
Do they break the problem into smaller pieces?
Do they ask for help?
Do they come back the next day and try again?
If a student gets stuck, they’ll often seek out someone who struggled with the exact same problem a week earlier. The solution isn’t always finding the answer immediately. It’s learning how to work through uncertainty.
What struck me when I first heard about this is how familiar it sounded. Because painting works exactly the same way.
Every painter encounters walls. A colour mixture that won’t work. A drawing that looks wrong. A painting that suddenly loses all sense of form halfway through. The difference is that when you’re painting alone, it’s easy to assume that getting stuck means you’re failing.
It doesn’t.
It means you’ve reached the next problem to solve.
This is one reason following a structured course can be so powerful. The path has already been laid out.
You know the painting has an ending because someone else has already walked the route before you. You know that the awkward middle stage eventually leads somewhere.
The challenge isn’t completing the entire painting in one leap. It’s identifying the next problem.
What often discourages painters isn’t the difficulty of the task itself. It’s imagining all the future problems they haven’t solved yet.
The ugly stage isn’t a sign you’ve taken a wrong turn.
It’s often proof that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
And what happened to Sam’s children and their paintings?
They finished them.
Gessa – Age 9
Joseph – Age 13
With some encouragement and a reminder that the goal wasn’t perfection, it was the experience of working through the process.
“This project was one of our favourites this past school year.”
Paintings rarely reveal themselves all at once.
They unfold gradually, layer by layer, decision by decision.
Experienced painters have learned not to panic when the middle gets dark.
They recognise the ugly stage for what it is: not failure, but evidence that the painting is still in progress.
If you’re judging something that isn’t finished yet. It’s like reading half a novel and deciding whether the story was worth telling before you’ve reached the final chapter.
So keep going. Add the next brushstroke. Solve the next problem. Give the painting a chance.
Because until you’ve reached the end, you don’t know what you might create.
If you’ve been searching for less toxic mediums to use with traditional oil paints, you may have come across a mysterious product by Schmincke, ‘Medium-W’.
It sounds more like a character from a Bond film than an artist’s medium, but it’s actually quite an ingenious solution for turning traditional oil paints into water-mixable ones.
Seems like magic?
In this guide, we’ll look at what Medium-W actually is, what it does to the handling of your paint, how much to add, the difference between the fluid and gel versions, and if it’s the right medium for you.
The moment you tell yourself, “I need to draw more,” the process can suddenly feel pressured, important, loaded with expectations… and strangely less enjoyable.
Drawing becomes “Art.”
The sketchbook becomes a test.
Every blank page starts quietly asking: “Is this good enough?”
And often, that pressure arrives before the pencil has even touched the paper.
Recently, Kathy emailed me describing something very similar. She explained that once she actually begins drawing, she quickly loses herself in the process and enjoys it enormously. The challenge wasn’t really drawing itself; it was getting started.
The search for the “perfect” subject or composition had become so overwhelming that it was preventing the simple act of drawing in the first place.
So I’d like to suggest an alternative approach: stop thinking of it as drawing and start thinking of it as observing.
The moment you shift into observation, a lot of the pressure disappears. There’s no longer the expectation that something has to become a finished piece of art. You’re simply noticing things.
You might observe the colour shift within a shadow.
The way fabric folds across the arm of a chair.
The shape of a reflected highlight on a mug.
Or you might simply experiment with a new material or pencil without any expectation of producing something “good.”
There’s a freedom in that mindset because the work no longer feels as though it needs to be framed, judged, or critiqued. The sketchbook becomes a place for curiosity rather than performance.
And really, that’s what drawing has always been: observation made visible.
By reframing it this way, you quietly remove the weight of the capital “D” in Drawing.
Instead of thinking: “I’m going to make a good drawing.” Try thinking: “I’m just going to fill one page with observations.”
And then you get to unlock a sense of frictionless creating; some of the most valuable sketchbooks are visually messy but mentally free.
One of the fastest ways to improve as an artist is to get into the habit of checking your own work as you make it.
That might sound obvious, but it is one of the biggest differences between a beginner and a more experienced painter.
A beginner often keeps painting, hoping the piece will somehow come together. If anything, desperately picking up the pace when things start to go ‘out’.
A more experienced artist stops. Then checks, then adjusts.
That practice changes everything.
Progress in painting is not about learning new techniques. It is about learning to see. The more accurately you can judge your own work, the less dependent you are on guesswork or hoping for the best.
You start to spot small problems before they become big ones. You notice when a drawing is leaning, when a value is too light, when a shape is too wide.
And once you can see the problem, you can usually fix it.
That is why artists have always used simple checking tools to sharpen their eyes. Not because they lacked skill, but because they understood something important:
Your brain gets used to what it is looking at.
After staring at a painting for too long, mistakes can begin to disappear. The wonky ellipse looks normal. The portrait that is slightly ‘off’ starts to feel convincing. The unbalanced landscape composition seems ok, because you’ve looked at it for an hour.
A mirror breaks that familiarity.
It reflects the painting back to you in a way your brain has not yet memorised.
It’s always a pleasure to visit a gallery that feels so naturally in tune with the kind of paintings you already enjoy, and Pallant House in Chichester feels exactly like that.
The gallery is situated within a Grade I-listed Queen Anne townhouse, with an impressive modern extension. It creates a comfortable mix of the period beauty of a townhouse, built in 1712 for Henry Lisbon Peckham and his wife, Elizabeth Albery, and the contemporary galleries of the new wing.
This week, I’ve been focusing on the simplicity of set-up and essential techniques.
Sometimes you want to get painting quickly, so I’ve propped a blank canvas or board behind my subject on the kitchen countertop, where the light was streaming in.
I used Oil Paper from a pad, just a handful of water-mixable oils, one water-mixable thinner for dilution, and a couple of brushes.
What an incredibly creative few months it’s been for students working through the courses and lessons. From the first-ever paintings taking shape on the canvas, to one student revisiting the same lesson ten years later! And others are going on to win awards at exhibitions. Many of these successes are linked to free tutorials, so you can follow along yourself.
Even if you’re returning to something you’ve tried before, you’ll often spot something new the second time around.
