quick art primer

Before you paint a picture paint the whole canvas a "base tone"` (brown or grey etc) why? because generally in painting you want to paint from light to dark. You want to leave your shadows and darks fairly thin and transparent and your base tone helps with this and it can serve as your shadow areas with very little messing around. Your lights and whites will be thicker and you can pile them on like mashed potatoes if you wish. If you are new to art go easy on colors--- use only a few so you can focus on drawing and tone and not everything at once. The life of a color is generally dependent on what is beneath it. If you paint (like I tend to) with a lot of glazing then you will lay/ glaze down a red and let dry then paint a transparent blue on top (for a powerful purple) as opposed to just painting a "lifeless" purple...if you are an abstract expressionist then you have nothing to learn about art and you can just be willy nilly and free like the crazy man on ice rink in Central park I remember seeing as a kid. There are no rules, only consequences.