On Painting: Where do I start?

[Mathonius]

Oil, Acrylic or watercolor?
Money's no object.
Wanna eventually dabble in all of them, I just want a starting point. Been so uninspired lately, I think some color is exactly what I need.

Oh, and I've painted like twice in my life with watercolors. That's it. 

[Esn]

You want to learn traditional or digital?

[elephant]

I'm guessing traditional.

Watercolours are great for playing around with colours, but I prefer oil myself, because I just naturally have more control over the medium and it's more plastic to work with. Not fond of acrylics.

Just close your eyes and pick one. 

[Pieter]

I'dd start out with acrylics personally. The skills should transfer trough to the other two, and it's not as smelly or expensive as oils.
Having a waterbrush and a small watercolor set is great for sketching on the road.

For acrylic pigments look at the pigment opacity on the tubes (it's usually marked in a small square). Cadmium colors are the most vivid.
Try using a simple palette of 3 colors and try to get as many different hues out of them as you can, you don't need that many.
For acrylics I'dd recommend using synthetic brushes, flat or filbert. But that's highly personal.

Oils are great tough, but I can't stand the fumes and they're too pricey for me.
In the end it doesn't matter what you use, it's in how you use it. Just have fun with it.

[Esn]

To be honest, if it were me, I'd forget about paint and buy a set of erasable color pencils (maybe mechanical if I can find them). I like the kind of aesthetic that you can get with them.

As for paint, it's been a while, but I remember preferring acrylics and watercolors... not really a fan of oils. Watercolors are nice if you would prefer to do linework first, then colour them - just be sure you use pens that are waterproof so that they don't smudge. Alternately, you can use dense black watercolor for outlines, like I did over here (boy, that was a long time ago...).

[elephant]

To be honest, if it were me, I'd forget about paint and buy a set of erasable color pencils (maybe mechanical if I can find them). I like the kind of aesthetic that you can get with them.

As for paint, it's been a while, but I remember preferring acrylics and watercolors... not really a fan of oils. Watercolors are nice if you would prefer to do linework first, then colour them - just be sure you use pens that are waterproof so that they don't smudge. Alternately, you can use dense black watercolor for outlines, like I did over here (boy, that was a long time ago...).

Agreed, watercolours look great with ink drawings. And starting with coloured pencils isn't such a bad idea either, you can get quite a lot out of them.

[Esn]

On that note, if you're looking for pens, I've found these two stores to have a great selection:
http://jetpens.com/
http://cultpens.com/

[Mathonius]

Wow, thanks for responding dudes, that was some comprehensive stuff.

Pieter: I read that acrylics were best to start with, I may go with them. I really only need three colors? Should they be similar colors?

Esn: Those pens are sickkk. Would that go over ok if I was working with canvas?

I'm super new at this, I'm off of work tomorrow (finally, I work at RadioShack and it's been a long week), so I'm gonna take a trip up to the art store. I guess I'll just pick up some synthetic brushes as well. If Pieter says they work well for him I might as well give it a go. Thanks guys!

[Esn]

The three colours you need to get every single other colour (except for white) are "yellow", "red", and "blue". That's like the most basic thing about paints. Here are some links to get you started:
http://www.alifetimeofcolor.com/main.taf?p=2,1,1,17
http://painting.about.com/od/colourtheory/ss/color_theory.htm

As for pens on canvas, I don't know, I haven't tried that. To elaborate a bit on the links: JetPens sells pens from Japan which are usually not sold in Western art stores. CultPens sells more from Western companies. The Japanese make nice calligraphy brushes as well as some really thin pens that the Westerners don't make.

The pens I use most frequently in my own work (comics) are gel ink pens: the Pilot G-2 0.38mm, which gives a very straight, unwavering line, good for outlines and lettering, the Hi-Tec-C 0.25mm for cross-hatching or more sketchy outlines, and the uniball 0.18mm for some very exacting work. This probably doesn't help you because your own needs are different - just make sure you pick waterproof pens and look at the reviews that people give them on JetPens... also, I don't think watercolour is usually done on canvas, is it? I'm not sure why you'd be using pens on canvas...

If you're trying acrylics, Wikipedia says:

In 2008 Golden Artist Colors introduced a slow drying acrylic paint with working qualities similar to oils, but indistinguishable from regular acrylics when completely dry. This new acrylic paint can remain wet and workable on a palette for several hours and even days under normal conditions.

[Pieter]

If you're using very bright colors such as the cadmium ones you might stick to the printing spectrum ( bright cyan, lemon yellow, magenta ).
In fact these are the correct substractive primaries (cyan, yellow, magenta) but because paint pigments are not chemically pure they don't mix this well in practice. That's what most art teachers will tell you. In reality tough, these days the amount of pigments is so wide that you can do it the physically correct way. Nevertheless, blue, yellow and red still work fine. Just saying that most color theory around is based on faulty dogma. That doesn't make it less valid, just dogmatic.
Note tough that you'll need to do a lot of mixing to tone them down enough. Should be good practice tough.

In reality there's a lot more to pigments tough, and painters tend to use a wide variety of them depending on the mood they're going for as well as their personal preferences. Some pigments are more opaque and others tend to be very agressive (vermillion, black, cerulean blue, etc).
Also get ivory black and titanium white. And perhaps if you want a warmer white.
You can mix a good gray with them you can use to tone down the chroma of your colors.

In the end tough, you can make almost any color combo work if you know how to use it.
So just have fun with it, don't focus on learning academics too much at this stage. Just get used to the materials.

If you want to learn more about color theory, check this link: http://www.huevaluechroma.com/
You WILL be confused by it tough! Needs some time to sink in  

A generalized overview of the color spectrum:

Additive Primaries - Light: Red, Green, Blue
Substractive Primaries - Surfaces: Cyan, Yellow, Magenta

Warm hues: Red, Orange, Yellow (1)
Cold hues: Cyan, Blue, Violet (1)
Neutral hues: Green, Magenta (2)

On the warm hues gray will look cold.
On the cold hues gray will look warm.
On the neutral hues gray will look neutral - this is purely theoritic.

( CIELab color system: 1: 'Temperature', 2: 'Tint' )

Color values:
Dark to light to dark:

Violet (darkest), Blue, Cyan, Green, Yellow (lightest), Orange, Red, Magenta, Violet (darkest)

[Mathonius]

Definitely diggin' those pens Esn.

Pieter, I definitely copied and pasted that post to my email. That's like colors 101. I'm gonna reference that quite often, thanks a bunch.

So in my local art store, I found:

14-pack of acrylic paint
Acrylic sketchpad
Palette
Small brush kit, like 12 brushes I think
Big brush for washes
Stand-up Easel (only 7 bucks on sale, what a deal!)
9 x 11 canvas board

All for under 50 bucks. Not bad!

Anyway, even though I have most all the colors I still wanna practice mixing... I gotta experiment tomorrow, though. Dead tired. :|

[Mercury]

Hey.
I aspire to be a digital artist. However, I am studying in oils so that I can learn about composition and mixing. I have studied watercolor and enjoy it very much, but oil comes as a challenge to me because it is so different than watercolor. If you do a lot of sketching, you may want to buy a small set of watercolors to compliment what you draw.