About painting, how to get started and inspiration

October 2022

I want to share my love of painting and the outdoors and encourage anyone out there finding it hard to get started to get splashing the paint! Also, please look at my paintings on Pinterest where you will see some of my creations, but not see my struggles! 

I've painted for as long as I can remember and it's a compulsion. I paint almost every day. But I know that it's sometimes hard to get started. A good question to ask is, what inspires you? For many years I have painted whatever people ask me to, illustrations, jigsaw designs, funny pictures. During lockdown I had a lot of time to myself and began to paint just for me!

I'm inspired by walks with my dogs in our beautiful Yorkshire countryside and sometimes further afield. Here's one of them, Barley, looking disgruntled after hurting himself jumping a stile near Kettlewell.

What I want to express is the feel of that countryside. I want to convey the pleasure I feel in those open spaces, absorbing the beauty, the colours, the wildlife, the changing seasons. I take photographs, but don't want to copy them. They are a reminder, so that I can recall the experience of the walk, then try to get that onto the canvas. 

Mostly I start with colour. I choose the colours I like and blend them over the canvas, making a background then gradually adding rough shapes of trees and pathways. I'm using acrylics at the moment. I'm inspired by colour, so choose the colours I enjoy using rather than trying to be accurate. 

So, what holds us up from getting started? Sometimes it's that blank white paper and a fear of messing it up. I think it's better to splash some colour on that white space and mess it up, than to not get started at all. Be brave, put some colours you like on your palette, and paint. Here's a small quick painting I did yesterday of some heather moorland.

. It has a textured background which I'll explain next time. 

Heather Moors

I'll add a Dream Painting here. It's inspired by an old wall in some woods near Pateley Bridge. The wall itself is interesting, old and crumbling and covered in moss. But it's an area that was heavily mined in the past and I imagined Packhorses and miners carrying loads up the hillside.

You can see the original in the store section of this website!

This is my first blog in a series about my process and theory of painting. I'll be back tomorrow with more about colour and how I got started with poured paintings, which absolutely anyone can do and get good results!

Linda