Learn acrylic painting to finished studies in four months
Four months at three sessions a week — about 90 minutes each, roughly 80 hours total — gets a complete beginner to a sequence of finished acrylic studies. You will not be a gallery painter. You will mix a clean colour, control an edge, and finish a small painting from start to varnish without it turning to mud. Acrylics dry in minutes rather than days, which is the whole point: you can complete a study in one sitting and start another the same week.
4 months · ~80 hours · finish a sequence of six 8×10 acrylic studies — value block-in, fruit still life, simple landscape
1.A Liquitex BASICS starter kit and a few extra brushes
Don't buy forty tubes. The Liquitex BASICS Acrylic Starter Box gives you nine student-grade colours plus a small set of brushes in one box — enough to learn value and mixing without the bill of artist-grade paint. Add a couple of flat synthetic brushes (a 1/2 inch and a 1 inch), a cheap plastic palette or a sheet of freezer paper, a stay-wet palette so the paint doesn't skin over while you work, and a pad of acrylic paper. Keep a jar of water and a rag within reach. Acrylics need no solvents — that's the practical advantage over oil. Budget roughly $80–90 all in from Liquitex, Blick, or Amazon.
~$85 starter kit (paint set ~$67 + brushes/paper/palette)
Liquitex BASICS Starter Box →2.Will Kemp Art School — free acrylic tutorials
Will Kemp is the canonical free teacher for acrylics on the web. He's a trained, gallery-shown painter who teaches classical fundamentals — value before colour, limited palettes, brush handling — in clear step-by-step videos. Start with his free "Beginner's Guide to Acrylics" and his four-part cherries still life, then work the free still-life course. Paint along with every lesson on your own panel; don't just watch. His whole method is built around the fast drying time of acrylics, so the studies he sets are exactly the ones you can finish in a session.
Free (paid full courses optional later)
Will Kemp Art School →3.Paint a sequence of studies, finish each one
The curriculum is the doing. Work a deliberate sequence: a flat value scale and a colour-mixing chart first, then a single piece of fruit on a plain ground, then a small group of objects, then a simple landscape from a photo. Finish every one — sign it, let it dry, varnish a couple. Don't abandon a panel because it's "going wrong"; pushing a bad study to completion teaches more than starting a fresh one. Six finished studies in two months is the target. Acrylic's speed is your friend here in a way oil's slow drying never allows.
Free (uses the kit above)
Free acrylic tutorial videos →If this doesn't fit you
If you want longer drying time to blend wet-into-wet and chase soft, atmospheric transitions, acrylics will fight you — switch to faculté's oil painting path, where the slow drying is the feature. If you'd rather work transparent, luminous, and with water alone, go to watercolor instead. Acrylic sits between the two: opaque like oil, water-based like watercolour, and the fastest of the three to finish.
Why this path
Beginners stall on two things: buying too much gear, and never finishing a painting. A single starter box kills the first problem, and acrylic's fast drying time kills the second — you can complete a study before you lose your nerve. Will Kemp teaches the same value-first, limited-palette discipline taught in oil ateliers, but in a medium that forgives the impatience of a beginner. The universal mistake is treating acrylics like slow oils; they're not, so paint in decisive layers and let the speed work for you.