What to look for in an online painting course (and the questions worth asking before you buy)

If you're thinking about joining an online painting course, you're probably not short of options. The internet is full of them — from platform-based video libraries to structured programmes with real feedback. The range is wide enough to be genuinely confusing.

This guide isn't trying to tell you which course to pick. It's trying to help you work out what actually matters when you're making that decision — the questions that are worth asking before you hand over your money.

The short version: the right online painting course depends almost entirely on what you're trying to do with your painting. Once that's clear, the decision gets much easier.

What kind of painter are you trying to become?

This sounds obvious but it's the question most people skip. Before you evaluate any course, it helps to be honest about what you're actually looking for.

Are you trying to learn technical fundamentals — how to mix colour, how to handle a brush, how to build up paint? Or do you already have the basics and you're trying to develop a more personal, expressive way of working? These are very different needs, and they call for very different kinds of courses.

A lot of online painting courses are built around technique: step-by-step instruction, demonstrations of specific effects, replicable exercises. That's genuinely useful if technique is what you're missing. But if what you're after is a way of developing your own voice as a painter — learning to make work that feels distinctly yours — you need something built differently.

Is the tutor an active, working painter?

This matters more than most people think. There's a difference between someone who teaches painting and someone who paints — and that difference shows up in what they can teach you.

An active painter can tell you how they actually make decisions in the studio. Not just what to do, but how to think about what you're doing. They can talk about uncertainty, about paintings that aren't working, about the gap between what you intended and what ended up on the canvas. That kind of insight is hard to fake and very hard to teach if you haven't lived it.

Before joining any course, it's worth looking at the tutor's recent work. Are they making paintings you find interesting? Are they developing, experimenting, producing new work? Or has their practice become static? A teacher whose work has stopped moving is less likely to help yours move forward.

Does the course offer feedback, or is it just video content?

Video-only courses have real value. You can watch demonstrations, pause and replay, work at your own pace. For some things — particularly technical skills — they're excellent.

But if you're trying to develop as a painter rather than just acquire techniques, feedback matters. Seeing your work through someone else's eyes — someone who knows what they're looking at — can change things quickly. It's the difference between practising in isolation and actually being in a teaching relationship.

Questions worth asking: Is there a community element? Can you share work and get responses? Is there direct feedback from the tutor, or only from other students? How structured is it, and does that suit how you learn?

Does the course reflect a genuine point of view?

The best painting courses have a clear perspective — a set of values and priorities that shape everything. You can feel it in how they talk about the work, the problems they focus on, the things they consider worth spending time on.

Courses without a perspective tend to be comprehensive but thin. They cover a lot of ground without going deep on anything. That can be useful as an overview, but it rarely changes how you actually paint.

Look at how the course describes what it's trying to do. Not just what it covers, but what it's for. What does it think painting is? What does it consider a good painting to be? If those answers are vague or absent, the course probably doesn't have a strong point of view — and a strong point of view is often what makes the difference between a course that teaches you something and one that just fills your time.

What are former students actually saying?

Testimonials on a course website are selected to persuade, so they need to be read carefully. What you're looking for isn't enthusiasm — it's specificity. Does anyone describe a concrete change in their work? Do they mention specific things they learned that they hadn't understood before? Are they talking about their painting, or just about the experience of the course?

Vague positivity ("really enjoyed it", "so inspiring") tells you less than you'd hope. Specific before-and-after accounts — "I used to do X, and now I do Y because of what I learned" — are more meaningful.

How Lewis's courses are built

The Abstracted Landscape course was built around a specific problem: how do you make paintings that feel genuinely connected to the landscape, without being bound by representing it literally? Every element of the course — the demonstrations, the commentary, the feedback — is shaped by that question.

Lewis is an active painter. His work is shown, sold, and continues to develop. The courses reflect how he actually thinks about making paintings, not a simplified version of it.

There's a community where work can be shared and discussed, and access to Lewis's thinking across a growing range of course bundles — including landscape, seascape, collage, and mixed media.

If you want to see how he teaches before committing, there are free taster videos available at courses.lewisnoble.co.uk. Worth a look before you make any decisions.

Lewis