The Secret of Painting That Not Everyone Wants to Hear

In this article, I explain how painting skill is learned—and the insight is transformative if applied in practice. Development can accelerate dramatically when you train using the right principles and methods.

A Teacher’s Story

Mark Carder, a painter whose method has greatly influenced my own training and understanding, has demonstrated how his students can paint almost as well as he does on their very first attempt using his method.

Accelerated learning is real, and painting skill is not merely a matter of talent.

Mark initially hesitated to teach his full method. But at one point, he decided to share everything he knew with a friend. To his surprise, that first student immediately painted at nearly his level.

This stirred conflicting emotions in him. He even recounts waking up in the middle of the night to look again at the student’s painting—hoping it would be worse than he remembered. It wasn’t. It was genuinely good.

Recognizing the selfishness of that reaction, he chose instead to make it his goal to help his students become better painters than himself. Since then, he has openly shared his entire method, including all details and steps, on YouTube.

I share this story because I know his method works—it captures the core principles of painting. It is not the only way to learn, but all effective methods ultimately follow the same foundational ideas, even if the emphasis varies between teachers.

The Core of Painting: Strengths and Weaknesses

The right color/value in the right place. That’s it.

This is the essence of painting. If you learn this, you can, in principle, paint anything.

Does that sound oversimplified? Often the deepest truths are simple. But simple is not the same as easy.

Painting is difficult—even for experienced artists. But the difficulty is not necessarily technical; it is largely mental. Placing the correct color in the correct position requires calmness, focus, and discipline.

Moreover, the more precisely you follow a proven method, the more likely you are to succeed. Yet following instructions often creates internal resistance. At least for me, it does.

I have to admit that I’ve only rarely followed instructions exactly, but when I have, it clearly shows in the results. By rough estimate, I’ve completed only about 50 exercises where I strictly followed the given process.

The Role of Discipline and Feedback

If possible, it is worth practicing under the guidance of a skilled teacher. Having someone evaluate your work increases motivation to truly do your best. It raises the threshold for taking deceptive shortcuts.

When working alone, your standards are set by your own internal benchmarks. The pressure to perform must come from within. However, appropriate external pressure can energize and improve performance.

Ultimately, the choice is always yours—no amount of external feedback can change your direction if you decide not to follow it.

The exercises I’ve shown are exactly that: exercises. They rely purely on fundamental principles, without tricks.

This is both good and bad news.

The “secret” of painting is ordinary and somewhat unromantic. Skillful art is less about vague “artistic expression” than many assume. What even is “artistic”? I’m not sure.

A good painting emerges from placing the right colors in the right places.

Fundamentals are best learned by painting from observation—either from life or from photographs.

What Happens After the Fundamentals?

Once the fundamentals are solid, you gain flexibility and can begin making stylistic decisions. Photorealism is not the highest form of painting.

Here you can see one of my stylistic acrylic paintings from 2025:

At this stage, painting becomes interpretation rather than mere replication.

When your eye reliably perceives values and colors and your hand can place them accurately, you gain true freedom. Only then can you intentionally break rules, exaggerate, simplify, or abstract without the result collapsing.

Style is not the opposite of fundamentals, it is the result of them.

In this sense, photorealism is an excellent training tool, but a poor ultimate goal if treated as an end in itself. It teaches you to see correctly, but not what to say.

When technique no longer consumes all your attention, deeper questions emerge:

• What do I want to emphasize?

• What can I leave out?

• Where should the viewer’s eye be directed?

My acrylic painting above represents this transition. I am no longer trying to replicate a photograph exactly, but to make choices—reducing detail, exaggerating contrast, and allowing the brushwork to remain visible.

None of this would have been possible without sustained foundational practice from observation.

Conclusion: Why This Is Liberating

I wrote this article mainly because there is a persistent myth about innate talent in painting. The story of Mark Carder is a powerful antidote to that idea.

It shows that painting skill is not mystical—it is learnable, provided the method is correct and the practice is systematic.

This is both comforting and demanding.

• Comforting, because skill is not reserved for a gifted few.

• Demanding, because progress does not come through shortcuts, but through steady—sometimes even boring—practice: observing, comparing, and correcting.

If I had to summarize everything in one sentence, it would be this:

A good painting is not born from inspiration, but from accurate seeing.

Inspiration can come later. Seeing must be learned first.

Best regards,

The Ocular Scientist