Learn How to Paint Like Picasso

Learn How to Paint Like Picasso

Pablo Picasso is a staple name in the world. Even non-artists know his name due to his massive influence on the 20th century art style. While everyone seems to know his name, how much do we actually know about the artist’s life? The key to understanding an artwork is to understand the life of the maker of the art. With that, this article is all about one of the most creative geniuses history has ever known. He is known for creating 50,000 works of art during his lifetime, ranging from paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, and drawings. Let us explore the life and art style of Picasso for you to learn how to paint like Picasso. Keep reading this blog post if you wanna learn more.

Prior to actually reaching the age of 50, Pablo Picasso, a Spanish-born multi-talented artist, had already established himself as the most well-known figure in modern art, with the most notable  style and eye for artistic production, not just in painting but also other types of arts.  Before Picasso, no other artist had made such an influence on the world of art or had a really strong following of admirers and art critics alike. He is most known for co-inventing Cubism with Georges Braque, but he also pioneered collage and made significant contributions to the Symbolism and Surrealism art movements. Although he viewed himself as primarily a painter, his sculpture was nevertheless highly important, and he also experimented with printing and ceramics. Finally, he has a notably charming personality; his various connections with women not only bled into his art but may have guided its direction by giving him inspiration, and his conduct has come to represent the bohemian contemporary artist in public consciousness and imagination.


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The Life of Picasso: A Brief History

Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, in Málaga, Spain. Picasso was from a creative family; his mother was Doa Maria Picasso y Lopez. Don José Ruiz Blasco, a painter and art instructor, was his father. Despite his relatively young age, he rapidly showed interest in following in his father's footsteps: his mother said that his first word was "piz," a shortened form of lapiz, or pencil, and his father was his first instructor. Picasso began seriously studying painting when he was 11 years old. Several paintings from his adolescence survive, including First Communion (1895), which is representative of his traditional, albeit successful, academic manner.

His father shaped the child prodigy into a brilliant artist by providing Picasso with the greatest schooling the family could afford despite financial restraints, as well as taking him to Madrid to see paintings by Spanish Old Masters. Picasso resumed his painting instruction after the family relocated to Barcelona for his father to take up a new position. Picasso began to grow as a painter in Barcelona. He visited the Els Quatre Gats, a bohemian, anarchist, and modernist hangout. He also became acquainted with Symbolism and Art Nouveau, as well as painters such as Edvard Munch and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. This was his first encounter with the cultural avant-garde, in which emerging artists were empowered to express themselves.



In the later years of his career, he worked on his own copies of classic works by painters such as Diego Velázquez and El Greco during the 1950s and 1960s. Picasso had a significant effect in the world of art and several art movements, and several phases of his life were influential in their own right in terms of influencing his style. His early Symbolist works are iconic, and his inventions in pioneering Cubism developed a set of visual difficulties, tactics, and ideas that remained influential far into the 1950s. Even after the war, when avant-garde art's focus transferred to New York, Picasso kept a towering personality that will never be forgotten as his name is well-established in the art world even up to this day.

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Learn How to Paint Like Picasso by Knowing More About the Artist’s Style

His long art career is immensely known for having different periods, often characterized by the dominant colors and theme of his artworks emergent at those particular years. For example, The Blue Period, between 1901 to 1904,  he was searching for material that would best express traditional art-historical subjects in 20th-century terms when blue was the prevailing hue in his artworks. The subject of maternity was also one of his inspirations of the period. Rose period, on the other hand, was the time when he moved to Paris which helped him to significantly change his taste in color palette as well as art styles. 

Appropriate to the name "Rose period," Picasso had a more cheerful period from 1904 to 1906 featuring orange and pink hues in his color palette and the whimsical worlds of circus and harlequins after achieving some level of progress and overcoming some of his depressive state.  For the next two years, the influence of African culture became evident in his artworks from 1907 to 1909. 


Picasso's first masterwork was Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Five nude ladies are depicted in the picture, with bodies consisting of flat, fractured surfaces and faces influenced by Iberian sculpture and African masks. It seemed as though the art industry had drifted when Les Demoiselles d'Avignon first debuted. Objective form and representation as we knew them were utterly disregarded. As a result, it was dubbed "the most inventive painting in modern art history."

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, c. 1907


For the following years, Picasso's art style continued to change and evolve because of his natural tendencies to experiment. The birth of cubism, his influences in the abstract expressionist movement, and other influences in the art world are still as relevant today as it was before. 

How Do You Paint Like Picasso?

What are the important lessons we can learn from the prolific artist? If you wanna learn to paint like Picasso, consider picking up these lessons and tips:

  1. Free your creativity and imagination:

    If there is one great lesson we can learn from the great painter, it would be to be creative and inventive as much as you can. His creativity and imagination is manifested all through the artworks he made in his whole lifetime. By this, we shouldn’t let our personal judgments and other people's negative criticisms impair us from being unique and original because that's how we can achieve our personal style and technique. To paint like Picasso, unconventionalism is the key.

  2. Continue to experiment:

    Despite finding his unique style and sensibilities in art, Picasso continued to step out of his comfort zone and experiment with new styles and techniques, which is evident in the periods of his art life. Based on this, you should continue to experiment with different color palettes, art movements, shapes, and lines. Be playful with your canvas because you are the master of your masterpiece in progress.

  3. Get inspired with the cubism art movement:

    Rather than representing items from a specific point of view, Cubist artwork examines, disassembles, and reassembles objects in an abstracted approach depending on a variety of viewpoints. Cubism draws influence from light rather than shade and mixing. Outline geometrically where the light falls in your artwork. Utilize geometric lines to highlight where it would be natural to shade while executing a cubist style.

The Three Musicians, c. 1921

We hope that the story about the artist’s life, art style, and helpful tips help you paint like Picasso and use him as an inspiration for your artistry. Have fun!

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