If you haven’t got great painting ideas, then all the technical painting skills in the world will be near useless. But it’s also okay to allow some room for experimentation. Be gentle on yourself and allow yourself to make mistakes, to go down dead-ends, to see what might develop. Use each of these painting ideas as a starting point, not the endpoint.
List Your Options, Your Likes and Dislikes
You can’t have painting ideas without having an idea of what style of painting you want to make, or what genre. So the first step to finding painting ideas is to make a list of what your options you want to consider.
What subjects/styles do you think you’d like to make (also list what you know you don’t want to do), then narrow it down from there. For example, do you want to paint figures, landscapes, abstractions, etc.? What style do you want to use: realistic, expressionist, abstracted, etc.? Are you going to use a limited palette or have one color dominate?
Too many options are as paralyzing as too few, so narrow your list down to one or two and start working with those. Use these printable art journal pages to get going.
