IMHO I would say start simple and work your way up. Begin with doodling and then progress to more careful drawing. It's often easier to copy another artist's wo

IMHO I would say start simple and work your way up. Begin with doodling and then progress to more careful drawing. It's often easier to copy another artist's work or to draw from a photograph. One advantage is you can draw lines over your reference imagine and make measurements. From there you can practice shading and get a sense of tone. Don't try to cheat by smudging with your finger. It may sound stupid but make sure you have a full set of pencils as you'll probably want to go darker that you can with a regular pencil. Once you're somewhat happy with that I would then move onto acrylic paints. You can draw out the image as before with measuring and then use that pencil drawing as a guide to paint over the top. Be careful when using black paint. It may just be the paint I used but attempting to make darker shades by mixing black would just give black. Once you're happy with acrylic paints I would then move to oil paints. Oil paints take longer to dry than acrylic paints which can throw you off. One of the great things about paint is if you make a mistake, you can simply paint over it :-) (though with oils you may need to be a little more patient). You may want to take what I've said with a pinch of salt as I've not painted in years and I'm out of practice with drawing. I still make collage-type images in Gimp though :-)