A few months ago my girlfriend asked if I could draw a piece of art to be the image of a YouTube video for her music. She was composing a fight track for a D&D campaign I run and since I use Sync-Tube to sync music with my players during a game, uploading the track to YouTube was the easiest way to share it. But this meant having a visual aspect to the music as well.

An idea came to mind pretty quickly for this and I was able to put it almost all tonight in an evening. A large octopus with a sword fight with silhouettes of the characters from the campaign:

After getting through a large portion of the beginner level courses on 21 Draw, I finally felt like I could start dipping into the intermediate level courses. Starting with Aveline Stokart’s ‘Mastering Lighting and Shading’.

This is one of 21 Draws top highlighted courses, a large portion of it is even available for free on YouTube. Now that I’ve completed the whole thing it definitely deserves the top slot on the website and I would highly recommend it for anyone who wants to get more creative with lighting in their illustrations.

It starts by walking you through the basics of light and shadows on simple shapes. I always forget the specific names for different types of light and shadows so this was good for me, even if I’ve forgotten half of the names already. Then we did some studies of movie scenes to grasp light in action and after that Aveline provides a sketch that you then use to create 4 different lighting scenarios which is where the real takeaways come from.

While this is one of the most popular courses on 21 Draw I didn’t prioritise it. My interests had always been more around character design and creatures. But after branching out in a few other courses, I thought it would be time to keep trying to step out of my comfort zone.

This course is taught by Philip Sue and it looks like he has a lot of step by step process videos on his YouTube which likely cover a lot of the things covered in this course.

The mixed media course on 21 Draw launched a little over a month ago now. It’s their first mixed media course which was enough to make me want to give it a try. And it focused on strange creatures so it had a lot going for it in my eyes. It ended up being one of the more detailed courses I’ve taken so far.

The course is hosted by Eva Toorenent, an artist with a very unique approach to mixing watercolours with digital colouring. I’ve never done any serious watercolour practice before so I was excited at the possibility of learning a new medium.

Inspiration​

The first assignment of the course was 2 questions. I find these things rather cheesy and would usually skip them, but as I said in my previous blog post, doing these courses is my attempt to slow down and do the work.

Question 1: What gets you excited/happy? What can you talk about for hours? (5 sentences)

I put off a lot of the full illustration classes, to me they feel like putting together all the bits you’ve learned to try to make something more comprehensive. I had also hoped they would be more digital tool focused than traditional drawing tips but one like Laia Lopez’s are pretty basic on the technical aspects if you’re already familiar with the basics of the program you’re using. This course was titled 'Digital illustration for beginners' so maybe it's just time that I start taking the courses marked 'Intermediate' instead.

I enjoyed the exercises she proposed but I don’t feel like they prepared me for working on a full illustration.

After feeling pretty disappointed by the first creature course, I was excited after watching the introduction to ‘Designing Fun Animal Characters’ by Rodgon. His approach made sense to me right from the start.

1. Figure out the stand out physical features of a creature
2. Work from a simple base
3. Put those stand out features on the simple base

After enjoying my tiny goat lesson from earlier in the year, I was hype to get back to drawing animals again.

I managed to finished a a course at the start of May before Tears of the Kingdom came out, ‘Telling a Story Through Illustration’.

I was a little intimidated by this course because the idea of doing full illustrations still feels very challenging to me. Make a scene, draw a background, manage areas of focus and lighting. All the parts of drawing in one. Which I feel like I’ll never be ready for!

Thankfully this was another Tony Bancroft course and I’ve come to love his approach and his assignments. As a classically trained animator he’s focused on foundational aspects which is exactly what I still want to focus on.

In April I went through the course ‘How to Stylize Characters’.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this course. “Style” is a very nebulous thing, one that I’ve been told over and over again will develop with time and mastery of the basics. The course ended up focusing more on how you can work in different styles by taking different approaches and really iterating on your ideas.

The teacher broke down each part of the course with very well focused assignments and practical steps. With the idea being to draw the same character to match two different use cases. He was working on developing a Frankenstein’s Monster character while I made the mistake of choosing one of my own D&D characters who I’ve iterated on a few times already. I say this was a mistake as choosing a fresh character would have given me more freedom to experiment instead of feeling locked in a previously established character design. But even with that mistake on my side I felt like I was able to learn a lot from the assignments.

After a month focused more on digital art practices I decided to go with more challenging courses for April. Not challenging on a technical level, but challenging because this has always been something I've felt my own drawings have lacked; energy and expression.

One of the March courses touched on this a little, going into the importance of silhouette and body language. I felt like that course had a lot of practical advice that was easy to start bringing in to my sketches. So I wanted to find a course that would keep elaborating on these approaches. Ending up on one titled "How to Bring You Characters to Life."

I wasn't sure what to expect from the course as I knew it would be different from the typical, here's how to understand anatomy that lots of art classes start with. Thankfully the instructor started by breaking down the main parts of a character that add life to an image.

For March I tried out a few shorter courses, two focused on getting familiar with Procreate and one about bringing life to your poses.

The Procreate ones were fun, focusing on creating a single piece from start to finish while learning some of Procreates key features. These tended to focus on portraits, which aren't usually my own focus but they're a good place to start.