Learn to Art Good
Without Going Into Debt
Fundamentals- Requirements Vary by Field
http://www.sycra.net/TheFundamentals.png
No Uniform Path
Art school is not required-
It tells you what to learn and then holds your hand through the bare minimum
Facilitates networking with peers- which may help you later
In the United States this also comes with unreasonable debt
All of the same information can be found online for free or much less $
Learn to love studying- this is will help to maintain your progress
It’s a long journey, learning will never stop, and you will not reach your goals quick
Example Progress- Suzanne Helmigh, Illustration
The Peaks and Valleys, Stress of Progress
Start Good Habits Early
How you hold and use your pencil/stylus/brush/etc.
Repetitive stress injuries
You can make it into your 30s using bad habits. Some people never have problems, but those who do then have to relearn, as well as accommodate the injuries that they have sustained. It’s not worth the risk.
Don’t work on a pure white screen + get blue light blocking glasses (you don’t need the super yellow ones, there are clear lens blue blocking glasses)
The Crux of Self Learning
If you’re not enjoying your time, there’s a higher chance that you’ll stop. Don’t study 100% of the time, you’ll burn yourself out. If you want to get into an industry, you will have to study some time. If you do not seek future employment but just want to have fun, only do exercises as much as you enjoy- but most of this will be directed towards those who wish to get to a professional level
Watching videos is not enough. Practicing the lessons is required to improve. Practicing once is not enough. These skills are not something that you just check the box for and move on. School builds in repetition to the courses for a reason
It will take repetition and time for the information to cement and be something that you can apply time and time again
Not all educational materials guide you on how long to practice each aspect. It is up to you to continue learning
Small tip- study/practice before bed. Your brain will continue working on it
Unfocused Practice vs. Deliberate Practice
How do you get stronger? You find out which lifts to do, what the proper form is, and then you lift weights, and eat healthy. And then heavier weights. Until you are lifting huge weights.
Similar for art- learn what to do and how to practice it, and then you start making bad art, get positive support from friends/peers, and then you make less bad art, and then you make OK art, and then you make good/great art.
How do you train for sports? High amounts of repetition of isolated drills, and simulated games to apply the drills. For art? Repetition of drills. Producing an piece to apply the lessons.
Don’t just practice, and don’t just make pieces.
No Barriers to Entry
You can learn the foundations that you need without specific tools
Pencil and paper is adequate, many courses even encourage it!
You do not need a screen tablet to draw digitally, a graphics tablet is fine
Graphics tablets have a learning curve that can take months to adapt to
However, graphics tablets help facilitate good posture and they cost a lot less
Any software is fine. Photoshop is most popular, but relatively expensive.
Clip Studio Paint, Procreate, Corel Painter, etc, all viable/acceptable
2D and 3D
Many artists end up learning both 2D and 3D programs to facilitate their process
Blender can help with the lighting of a scene- and define the forms in the image
Daz3D can help come up with poses- sometimes even with basic armor sets
At this point, if you want animation work, most jobs are for 3D animation
Nobody will be upset if you generate your own 3D reference, just don’t lie about your process. Be honest.
Reference, whether it is photographs or digital, is strongly encouraged- ignore the people who proclaim that using reference is cheating. Wrong. It’s encouraged!
Use Reference
Learn to Sketch - Free
The first thing you can learn to do, for free, is learn how to effectively sketch from reference.
FZD’s “Sketching 101” blog/YouTube video is a great resources to start with
Fundamentals - Mostly Free
Forrest Imel- Free youtube intro to fundamentals video, optional gumroads. They suggest the “Force” by Mike Mattesi for gesture
CtlrPaint - a free site (with an optional pay version) that covers the basics of using Photoshop, as well as some exercises that you can practice basic drawing both traditionally and adjusting to a tablet
Swatches - Quick summary of the fundamentals of art. Theory and guide, light on exercises to practice.
Proko - Anatomy and gesture heavy. For many, the detailed anatomy lessons will be overkill. If you need help in a specific area that will be highlighted, look here. Videos where he has a guest lecturer tend to be very good and more varied than just anatomy.
Marc Brunet - “Learn to Draw in 30 Days” focuses on starting to learn construction with practical applications
Steve Hutson’s videos on the New Master’s Academy- Great series on gesture drawing practice.
Drawabox - Free website, Subreddit, Discord. Exercises to practice 3D
The Drawing Database - Another collection of fundamental videos
Artstation Learn - currently free through the end of the year (update- offer has expired)
Prefer physical books? James Gurney’s “Color and Light” and “Imaginative Realism” are two of the most recommended art books
Loomis’ books are available free: https://www.alexhays.com/loomis/
Guided Education - Paid
Schoolism has professional instructors. Membership as low as $200/yr w/ discount
https://www.brendanmeachen.com/soloartist - Redirects to other online resources, many paid, to study, in what order, for how long. Will take ~2 years to complete, hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on which paid courses you buy.
Marc Brunet’s Art School - studies/exercises broken into 10 terms to guide development.
Hue Teo’s Gumroad Fundamentals series - Lecture light, exercise heavy. Will take ~1 year to complete.
CG Master Academy is $700 for 10 weeks of courses with personalized feedback
The New Master’s Academy is similar to Schoolism, $39 or $49 per month
The Watts Atelier will let you purchase individual courses, video or live streamed
Forrest Imel’s Gumroad - teaches you the way he learned to get to Riot/Blizzard/WotC etc work
Mentorships - Paid
If you have the financial means, you can hire a mentor to guide you individually through the process
Most useful after you have already made a sincere effort at learning and have made a good amount of progress. Otherwise you risk them providing the same information/exercises as the free resources
They can point you in the right direction when you get stuck, but they cannot do the work for you. There is no secret tip that will let you skip practicing
Can range anywhere from $40/hr to $200/hr or higher, usually one or two hours per week
Peer Education - Free
You can find art communities of peers to join and learn along with. Friendly competitions/rivalries have pushed many artists forward to successful careers
The Art Corner Discord server has a mix of professional artists and novice artists
Watch artists who do the things you want to do. They often will be happy to talk about their process
Just about every artist on Twitch has their own Discord server, most are largely inactive. Of the active servers, many have critique and learning sections to help artists along in their progress
Other people can keep you on task, if you feel an obligation to continue to put in the work and show your progress
How to Receive Critique
When someone, whether a mentor or just an experienced artist volunteering their time and attention, is giving you feedback, it is important to learn how to take it
Do not defend your art. Do not explain why you did some things some ways- they do not need to know. YOUR ART MUST SPEAK FOR ITSELF. You will not be there to explain your art or your intentions every time someone sees your art
Detach yourself from your work, after it is submitted, stop thinking of it as yours. Take the information as if they are talking about someone else’s work being evaluated
Be 100% honest in your answers when they ask direct questions. Lies/avoiding the truth will only hurt your growth
The feedback is to help you, don’t take it personally, use it to redirect/refocus your efforts
If you are watching someone else get critique, take notes, learn as much from their mistakes as yours
From Reference vs. From Imagination
Most of the educational material will teach you how to draw from reference, and in the long run the hope is that you will learn from that experience to create from your mind.
Kim Jung Gi is renown for his ability to draw from imagination- but this came from him drawing those subjects thousands or tens of thousands of thousands of times before drawing from imagination.
Hue Teo’s course is one of the few that teach you how to draw from both reference and imagination.
Marc Brunet’s youtube channel has many useful videos, ‘How to Draw in 30 Days’ and ‘These drawing exercises will change your art’ are applicable to drawing from imagination.
Also, there is this guest artist on Proko’s channel who provides construction exercises that will help you to eventually draw more from imagination. They build off of all those boxes and other primitives in perspective that most instructors start with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6T_-DiAzYBc “6 Steps to Draw Anything”
Style
Take notice that none of these resources are on how to learn or practice a specific style. Style is not one of the fundamentals.
Style is the icing on the cake, the paint on the walls. It is nothing without the structure that the fundamentals provide.
For example, anime is a style, broadly speaking. Not all anime art is good art, you can tell the difference between the artists who have a strong foundation and those who are hoping that the simplifications will hide their weaker foundation.
You cannot skip steps. You have to learn the rules before you break them.
Learning Design
Design is most commonly associated with concept art, but illustrators and other disciplines would benefit to learn this as well.
There are fewer resources available online that explicitly stick to talking about design than the other skill sets. As such, it isn’t as often explicitly studied, and unless it is their specialty/area of work, some artists get by on intuition rather than deliberately learning about shape language. This can make it difficult for them to change the style of their products between products, or if the style that they worked in goes out of fashion.
Forrest Imel is an artist for Riot/Blizzard/Magic/etc and he has a Character Design video on gumroad that walks through his thought process. https://forrestimel.gumroad.com/
Design Lectures - Free
Paul Richards had been producing his blog on autodestruct.com for years before moving on from it- but he has left up his design lectures. You can also look at his design work for the Halo 4 and Darksiders 2.
Design Lecture - Free
The DotA 2 workshop also has a fairly useful intro to character design as well https://support.steampowered.com/kb/9334-YDXV-8590/dota-2-workshop-character-art-guide
Focus on What You Love
There are jobs that focus on rendering, there are jobs that focus on drawing, etc, virtually whatever it it is that you get good at, there will be some jobs that suit that skill set. If you love something more than all others, if you want to get work to do it, make sure that you are very good at doing it.
If you hate doing characters, focus on other things. Feel free to try characters later, you may change your mind
Sincerely enjoy doing everything? Great, order them by what you are initially most interested, try them in order and see what works best for you
A large percent of artists change their area of work at least once, some after paying for college for that specific field- it’s not a huge deal. Your past experiences in areas that you don’t stick with will still be helpful in ways you may not have imagined