When people are learning to paint then they assume that painting a face or person would be their easiest option, because it is a lot smaller than a house or a landscape. The problem though is that painting facial expressions is really difficult as you need to make them express the emotion you want, and getting the proportion of the features and the posture right is a real pain!

Personally I think you are much better off buying some landscape tutorial books and starting to try some simple landscapes instead. You don’t have to paint anything wonderful at first, just put in the sky and some hills with grass on, then start to build features onto that and experiment as you go. Landscapes use rich colors, and they are easy to recognize too, so even a basic painting can be beautiful, which will really help to motivate you as you are learning and give you work to show off to family and friends.

Working on landscapes also allows you to easily practice using depth in your painting, you can have a tree near you on the landscape, and then a house in the distance, and work on getting the shapes and proportions right to suit their distance to each other. You also get a chance to work with light as you need to show the effect the sun has on the different features of your painting. All this means you will never be bored painting a landscape and will learn something new every time you try one.