SELF-TAUGHT GUIDE | Note #4
Free art resources and courses to become a successful self-taught artist
Hello friends! How are you doing? I’ve really missed talking with you here and hope to come back to it more consistently soon..:)
Today I’ll be talking about a very dear topic: learning. As you may already know (or maybe not, if you are new in here), I’m a self-taught artist. A few years ago an art supplier had the audacity to tell me that I should not specify that I’m self-taught when making art review videos or other content. You know, it sounds like you’re not a professional. I then stopped presenting myself in that way for a while. Until one day..
One day I was listening to an interview with a Disney artist (I think it was Armand Serrano) and he said he was a self-taught artist, because he used to study and work as an engineer. I was flabbergasted. Why was I ashamed to tell people that I was a self-taught artist while an extraordinary professional artist was not?
This event taught me two important lessons:
Never listen to what others say. Always listen to your gut and be honest with people.
Listening to the stories and experiences of other artists is the best way to get motivation and the fastest way to get information and updates about the art industry. That's why I truly recommend following my forArtists page, where I interview great artists twice a month.
This being said, I think all of us, self-taught artists, have a good reason for not getting formal art education. It may be financial problems, family who doesn’t support you, lack of confidence, or all these reasons together. But these reasons are not an excuse for you not improving and becoming a professional artist!
Today I’m here to share with you all the free tools that have helped me improve and be proud of myself. I will divide them into categories:
LEARNING TO DRAW
Being able to draw doesn’t mean just being able to copy what you see in a photo or in real life. It means understanding things at a deeper level. Deconstructing things into simple shapes and being able to place them in a 3D space.
drawabox.com has the best lesson that will teach you how to draw being aware of form and structure.
LEARNING ANATOMY
You can find thousands of books on anatomy. But how many books are about simplifying anatomy?
The best free resource you can find on the internet is Proko channel. I’ve learned so much from their tips and drawings. But if you want to go further, you can sign up for one of their advanced (paid) courses.
FIGURE DRAWING PRACTICE
The best practice you can do when it comes to anatomy is drawing people from real life. But this is not always possible for everyone. Also, you may need a little guidance and some shortcuts to become more confident with drawing people in different poses.
Ahmed Aldoori is a great artist and teacher when it comes to anatomy and figure drawing. Just take a look at this class. You’ll see what I mean ^.^
If you want to draw from photos for half an hour and don’t want to waste time looking for references, then I suggest you to take a look at these platforms. They all have timed figure drawing sessions.
Adorkastock.com has very genuine photos! And I always find interesting poses for my illustrations.
Lineofaction.com has even more photos organized into categories: figure drawing, animals, hands and feet, face expressions, environment and basic shapes.
Quickposes.com has a large variety of poses organized into categories such as warriors, seated people, etc.
New Masters Academy has a couple of playlists with timed figure drawing and a few live sessions also. It’s my go-to platform when I want to warm up.
CHARACTER DESIGN
I love love doing and seeing character designs! It’s such of a challenge making characters feel alive and believable. It’s always refreshing to visit Ron Doucet’s blog, Flooby Nooby and read this post in particular.
He also provided us with an entire Character Design course for FREE! Thank you Ron! There’s everything you need in there.
And if you’re looking for character references and different ways to stylize them, I recommend checking out characterdesignreferences.com . If you go to their visual library, you can find lots of drawings and step-by-step tutorials organized by topic. And all topics are organized into Pinterest boards. So, for each topic you can see a bunch of artist’s designs gathered together.
ART FUNDAMENTALS
Art Fundamentals are a sort of rules that artist follow consciously or unconsciously. Mastering them means mastering all of these 6 topics: form and structure, anatomy, perspective, composition, color and lighting and shadow.
When it comes to form, perspective, composition and lighting, I cannot recommend enough these 20 precious pages created by Paul Felix, a veteran Disney artist.
Regarding lighting, I have two free resource for you:
Richard Yot’s free extract from his book Light for Visual Artists
Jeremy Vickery’s channel called Lighting Mentor
ART ADVICE and TUTORIALS
clipstudio.net has lots of art tutorials and advice from professional artists. I really enjoyed these articles on some of my favorite artists, Cosmic Spectrum and Bluebirdy.
Iris Muddy did a great talk on Appeal and Design during an art event I attended. Fortunately, it is now available for everyone.
MASTER ART
I’ve recently discovered the GreatArtExplained channel and I’m literally obsessed with it. Every video focuses on one piece of art and explains everything about it- the history, the technique and the meaning. I’m sure you’ll love it!
★ In this video I’m showing more about each and one of these resources. Hope you’ll enjoy it :)
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this is a really great article! you actually gathered a lot of resources i used when i was learning how to draw during my high school and uni years, i’m so glad people still find them helpful 💖 there’s also the Sinix Design youtube channel - i’m not sure how the artist doing now, but i know there are still plenty of helpful videos on digital art. and another artist i recommend a self-taught artist to watch is Sylessae, they have amazing videos just with a good pep talk - very helpful when you start questioning yourself (i wish i had them when i started out, could’ve save me so much of mental anguish)
Thank you for these resources! I'll definitely go through these. I'm also a self taught artist :D.