Technique Won’t Improve Your Paintings. This Will.

I spent years thinking more technique was the answer.

More brush skills. More colour knowledge. More hours at the easel. I truly believed if I just kept painting, kept practising, everything would click into place.

It didn’t.

When I first started painting it was exciting. Properly exciting. I’d found this thing I loved and I wanted to do it all the time. And it’s true that the more you paint, the better you get. But there’s a catch to that, and it took me years to see it.

Technique alone isn’t enough.

I used to create some really great paintings. I also created a lot of bad ones. And honestly, it was more potluck than knowledge. Sometimes it worked and I didn’t know why. Sometimes it didn’t and I couldn’t tell you why that was either. It held me back for a long time, because you can’t fix what you can’t explain.

If I could go back and talk to my younger self, I’d tell her to start learning composition. Not more technique. Not more scrolling through social media picking up new brush tricks. Composition.

That means going to the masters. Getting close to their work and really looking. Not standing back admiring it, but asking why it works. Watch where your eye moves around the picture. Notice the marks they made and where they placed them. Ask why your eye stops where it stops.

Do that properly and something switches on. You go from painting on instinct, hoping it comes together, to actually understanding what you’re doing. And when a painting isn’t working, you stop saying “something’s just off” and start saying “that side’s unbalanced” or “I need a touch of that colour over there” or “my eye’s falling off the edge, I need to pull it back in.”

That’s the gap most painters have. It’s not colour. It’s not brushwork. It’s composition, and it’s the piece that ties everything else together. Missing it is like trying to bake a cake without flour. You can have the best ingredients in the world and it still won’t hold.

So here’s your takeaway. Go and look at a master painting this week. Really look. Ask yourself where your eye is moving, where it stops, how they’ve used colour to pull you round the piece. Start asking those questions and you’ll start seeing your own work differently too.

This is exactly why I built The Secret Language of Art. It fills that gap, the one nobody talks about, the one that actually changes how you paint. Doors open soon and the waitlist is open now if you want to be first to know.

Join The Secret Language of Art Waitlist

Happy painting,

Michelle

---