Recommended Courses and Resources

This article will be a rundown of the courses I learned the most from, and a sample of the sketches I did while taking them. I’d like to apologize for the quality of the photos; my sketchbooks are colossal. They don’t fit in the scanner and it’s too large a surface for the camera to expose evenly.

When I decided to go back to basics to strengthen my art in the long run, I started with perspective. I watched a lot of free YouTube videos, mostly Proko.

Next I moved to applying perspective. Antonio Stappaerts has a really good video on the Proko channel. Modernday James also has great videos explaining how to construct out of simple forms.

Just be warned, perspective is a temporary trap that will probably make your art worse, but once you figure out how to think in simple forms without drawing them literally, your will see huge improvement in your art. Just wanted to put that out there because my art got worse for a while and I felt like an idiot, but a lot of the time practicing the fundamentals isn’t pretty and might mess with your mind for a while. It is 100% worth it though!

I watched Dorian Iten’s videos about values and shading. Funnily this might have been earlier than I needed this information, but who knows!

Next was a tangent into figure and portrait drawing which I’ll leave out for now. At the time I had no direction in my art goals and hadn’t realized I wanted to illustrate animals.

Now we’re getting into the fun stuff! I took Glenn Vilppu’s animal drawing course on New Master’s Academy. I really think this is a must watch for beginning animal artists, and the first two hours are free on YouTube!

Next I took a bunch of Aaron Blaise’s animal drawing courses. I highly recommend taking Glenn Vilppu’s course first. Glenn talks very general and covers a lot of ground, and Aaron gets into details.

My absolute favorite course was Drawing with Life, Energy, and Story with David Coleman (on Aaron Blaise’s website). His course perfectly balances and builds on the more deliberate and technical drawing styles of Glenn and Aaron.

I also took his course on animal character design. Even though I’m not planning on doing character design, I learned a lot about shape language and design which made my everyday sketching easier and better.

I then created my own system for studying animals based on these courses. I would study the basic anatomy, then some fleshed out drawings. Then taking that information and drawing from videos and studying their movement.

Weirdly I don’t have a lot of resources to recommend for painting. Marco Bucci’s 10 minutes to a better painting series is the best course I can recommend. But I learned the most just by getting to it and doing a lot of master studies.

After doing a lot of master studies, I took Jonathan Hardesty‘s Understanding Texture course on Schoolism. I was struggling to add detail so his course really helped with how to think about rendering.

After all this I had a bit of a hiatus from courses. I had enough knowledge to keep me busy practicing for quite a while. Until I realized my understanding of perspective was really weak. I then took Marshall Vandruff’s perspective course on Gumroad. As much as I wish I had taken it sooner, I don’t think I would have had the patience for it. I absolutely loved getting all technical and solving weird problems as exercises for his course, but the past me wouldn’t have been that dedicated.

Now as a treat I recently took Steve Huston’s courses on portrait, figure, and hand drawing on New Master’s Academy. While it doesn’t currently look like I’ll be illustrating people as part of my career, you never know! It’s something I wanted to do and you can never have too much knowledge.

Making the time investment in instruction from professional artists was one of the best decisions for my art. While it’s tempting to sit and watch videos, you have to apply it! I saw the best results when I drew along with the instructor, and then for every hour of instruction, spent about another two hours practicing on my own.