A good way for beginners to start with art is to learn how to draw and then paint little birds. They don’t have to be exact replicas of the real thing, and in fact using your imagination to create fantasy birds is one of the most rewarding ways to start your art journey.

You can use any medium and any colors, and the composition and other elements of making a painting are reduced in this type of meditative doodle.

A new way to Swatch!

When you get a new box of paints, after you’ve unwrapped them the first thing you are tempted to do is to make a swatch sheet. Indeed, the manufacturers often supply a small piece of card for you to do that on. And it’s very useful as a note or memory jogger of what the colors in your tin look like – roughly – when you wet them.

But a better way, I think, is to actually use all the colors to paint something simple. So I’m sharing with you a sketch of twelve little birds and some leaves and branches which you can use to try all of your twelve colors, straight from the tin, for the birds. And then you can mix lots of greens and greys to make the colors for the branches and leaves.

As well, you can practice drawing the birds, as you don’t need to make them in any way accurate. Just use your imagination!

My Materials

For this painting I used the following materials: