I got started pretty recently!
I wanted a cheap drawing tablet for taking whiteboard style handwritten notes for a totally different project.
Decided since I had it I would play around with making some art. I ended up really enjoying it! It’s super relaxing.
Basically I just have Krita, which is free. Then I’ll take photographs or otherwise source images that I might want to paint, and try to recreate them as a reference. NOT tracing, but having the image side by side with the drawing. I find that to be the best for learning. I’m primarily a musician, and that’s how I was taught to learn music as well (listen to a piece and try to recreate it).
I checked out a few youtube videos about colors as well. Similar to above, I knew I didn’t want to just use a color picker to match the reference image (and I think the result would be bad anyway). So I watched how oil painters and watercolor people made their colors by eye, and have tried to recreate that process in Krita. This part has been the most fascinating, a lot of times your brain tells you you’re looking at a certain color, but because of shadows and lighting and stuff you have to know to choose a totally different color to produce that effect.
I’m pretty happy with it and I want to keep practicing so I can hand paint my own album art someday! 30+ too of course, altho now that I know I enjoy it I wish I had started much earlier
Yeah, come to think of it, what’s up with that one anyway?