What is visual arts?

What's the best way to begin teaching myself the visual arts?

• What's the best way to begin teaching myself the visual arts? I want to start learning the visual arts. I want to eventually be able to use different mediums in my art: paint, airbrush, digital tools, pencil, chalk, and more. For now, though, I want to know what I should do to begin teaching myself the basic aesthetics and techniques of visual art that will translate to the other artistic methods I mentioned.

• Answer:

  start doing it. Seriously. And after you've started you can add books from the library, classes, going to art shows, looking what other people do, doing research on the internet including youtube. But you never learn anything if you don't actually do it and experiment with it. And another important factor is, think of what you have done. If it didn't work as you planned, that's OK, as long as you learned from it and observed and thought about why it went wrong. but wishful thinking never got anything done. Right today, get some pencils (any pencils, if you don't have a pencil, take a pen, crayon, a piece of burned wood, a lump of earth) and a piece of paper (the sidewalk, a patch of earth) and start drawing some object you see. Think about how it looks like, not how you think it looks like. Look at it like it were a 2 dimensional image and observe the distribution of light and darkness on it. Try to look at what is there.