>>4035145There's some good content for painting on YouTube, lots of traditional artists on Instagram also share process videos, tips, or even have classes and tutorials, and there's a lot of good books as well.
It depends on what medium you want to use, and what subjects you want to paint.
My process when I first started (I started with watercolors) was: I know I want to paint with watercolors, and I want to do mostly natural stuff (landscapes, trees, etc). I looked up some watercolor artists and found a few that I liked, started to read their blogs, looked for their videos, analyzed their paintings and tried to look up how to do the things I couldn't figure out on my own.
Even simple "how to paint X" can be a good place to start to grasp the basics.
The first book I bought was The Urban Sketcher by Marc Taro Holmes, he used to do urban sketching at the time, but the book included a ton of techniques and terminology that I had no idea even existed, and it set me on the right path to learn more.
Just go to Instagram, YouTube Pinterest, Tumblr, etc and look up things like "medium" (e.g. gouache, watercolor), "medium+subject" (e.g. gouachelandscape, oilportrait), "medium+painting", "how to medium", that sort of thing. Save all the pieces you like, see if the artists have any educational content about it, watch the videos that pop up.
I promise you'll figure out what exactly you need to learn and what techniques are part of the process.
As for general tips:
- squint a lot to see values and masses of color
- start with large generic shapes, don't add details until the end when you have all your major features, colors, and values the way you want them
- wash your brushes when you're done
- you'll generally want to paint from dark to light, watercolor being the exception where you have to work from light to dark
- if watercolor is your medium, use less water. Everyone always uses super watered down colors and loses the vibrancy of the paint, don't do that!