Acrylic Painting by a Complete Beginner

Acrylic Painting by a Complete Beginner

September 2026

I have decided to take up a hobby and try my hand at painting with acrylics. I did get my Art O level at school but have not done any sort of painting since then, so I am talking about a very long time ago (approx 54 years)

I have my own sort of style and have decided to call it “Cuteism“.  I cannot do landscapes or portraits etc but do like to copy images as my imagination is not that great.

The first thing I did was to purchase some acrylic paints and found a great set on eBay (affiliate link to ebay) which came with 24 tubes of acrylic paint, 10 paintbrushes, a little palette and a very small piece of canvass. Also in addition I did purchase some charcoal pencils.

My first effort was of a kingfisher which I painted on to the canvass.

Once I had completed that I decided to buy an A3 pad of artists paper, again purchasing from eBay.  It has 30 A3 sheets so that will keep me going for a while.

My next effort was a painting of a vase which has some artificial flowers in it, that I have on my lounge window sill, but I have to say this did not turn out how I wanted it.  Hopefully they will get better.

The next was a lovely picture I found online of a cute little lion, so thought I would give that a go.  However that was so difficult and it turned out nothing like the picture and resigned myself to the fact that I could not paint fur (in addition to other aspects).

I decided that the future paintings would have to be a little more simplistic with not so much detail as my painting skills are not up to that, so after the disaster of this particular painting I decided just to do a charcoal pencil sketch of the little lion which was a little better.

Next was a multi coloured horses head – no texture needed so it was relatively simple and using bold colours, no mixing of paints was needed.

My next effort cute female giraffe which I have to say came out rather well so I was really pleased.  So much so that it was even put in a frame immediately.  Again a fairly simple design and easy to paint but effective.

I then found a lovely painting of Paddington Bear which I thought I would give it a go, but again had a problem with getting his fur right, but it turned out okay.

My next was a paining of Pooh and Eeyore.  I have two little china ornaments on my lounge window sill which are very colourful so decided to try and paint them.

Acrylic Painting by a Complete Beginner

They are very colourful, but the finished painting was not really that good. I couldn’t get the features of Pooh’s face right as it was hard to paint from a china ornament and Eeyore looks fat and grumpy!!

I then found a cute picture, again another Pooh and Eeyore inspiration which looked fairly simple, but again it did not turn out great as I mucked up the tree they were sitting on.

Finished Paintng to follow

Please keep coming back to this blog where I will update all my future attempts at acrylic artwork.