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Further reading:
Why Cats Paint
Once you've grasped that material I find:
to be the logical follow-up.
First of all, good for you for going for it and opening yourself up to critique on the internet. That takes some courage.
This looks like some Bob Ross technique, and while it's a good starting place to get the hang of using the paint and tools, the main limitation there is that the technique doesn't really respect where light comes from (thus things look flat), nor the difference in value and hue as impacted by distance from the viewer.
Issue 1 for me is that the sky and background are super dark and thus the foreground looks just way too colorful and yellow in context. If it's low light, those yellows are not going to pop like that.
My other tip is to avoid the fan brush, or at least use it very sparingly. It tends to impart too much detail in most places you use it, and when you use it everywhere, everything just looks overdone. That's what others mean when they are saying to "loosen up" the style. If you think about how your eye focuses on things, if you focus on something in the foreground, things behind it are only in soft focus. So in the painting, things behind the focal point should be more blurry, generally. If everything has sharp detail and contrast, it will look off. Try using bigger brushes and put in bigger blocks of color!
A book that really helped me was Lessons in Classical Painting by Juliette Aristides.
This is the answer. I bought this book (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1600582834/ ) when I first started out and it was helpful for a minute. But actually doing the mixing is how I learned too.
Mark Carder of Draw Mix Paint's video for mixing oil paints was really helpful for me in mixing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNB3XY67Q-I
Not really. In order to have an accurate calculator you would need accurate color values for every paint. Unfortunately paint varies from batch to batch just a little and frankly unless you are measuring at the 0.1ml level or precision you will get additional variations.
What you can do though is obtain a book of color recipes and then use primary colors from each paint line to mix a color you like. Useful if you want to mix a unique color.
For most typical modeling applications modelers have developed recipes for colors. For example: Soviet Aircraft were painted a light blue underneath called AMT-7 — one way to mix this using Tamiya paint is you mix 6 parts XF-23, 2 parts XF-8, 2 parts XF-2. There are other recipes for each color.
If you use an iPhone, the iModelKit app can help with mixing. I find it so-so, as it relies on scanning web colors, not measuring them directly. However once you know a color’s correct values, you can mix in the app to get close, which gives some ideas. I then try the mix IRL and adjust to my liking.
Get a color wheel. It helps with visualizing where to begin and which colors to start with. As you get more comfortable, consider getting a color recipe book that has every color you would want and ratios of colors needed to mix them.
If your available colors will be limited, but you are willing to buy modeling paints via mail order, I recommend Tamiya. It sprays very well using either DIY store lacquer or isopropyl alcohol 91%. The latter is better but it is possible to mix a tiny bit of lacquer thinner into the IPA. There are quite a few mixes using Tamiya for just about any and all military colors.
I’d focus on the base colors: white, black, red, blue, green, yellow, and silver. You can use the colors to mix or adjust the other colors to just about any color you would want. If you know you’ll use a premixed color often, get it.
You DoodEl'ed that one, for sure...is that a cockmic? I mean I know you can teach cats to paint I just didn't realize you could teach a cock to paint. Learn something new every day.
I found this book (https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Paint-Watercolor-50-Paintings/dp/1631592777) which seems to be along the same lines that I was looking for. Planning to borrow it from the library and give it a shot. Will update the thread if this book was useful.
These kind of artist paints are all that I use to paint. Thinning them down is handy, but not essential. If you are careful to not overload the paint and rely on very thin layers they work fine right out of the tube with a bit of medium mixed in. Artist acrylics tend to have a very high pigment density and very finely ground pigment they also are very opaque compared to pre-mixed miniatures paints so it takes less paint to achieve a similar effect.
The biggest difference is that you'll be mixing colors more often. Artist paints are very forgiving in that regard, but you will probably want some kind of mixing guide until you are used to the properties of the paint.
Yes actually. This cat chose Oversimplified Realism as his style, whereas most cats choose Expressionism, as show in the book Why Cats Paint.