21 Draw - A year in review

I paid around 80$ for a year subscription to 21 Draw, and it came with a free give away subscription which I was able to give to a friend. I had tried a few online learning programs over the years, more so when I was unemployed, but none with a year long commitment. I didn’t have any big plans for the year, I was going in with a kind of consistent job, a life still lived under semi-lockdown, and a longing to return to hobbies I’d struggled to get back into. I wasn’t sure how this was going to go but I had hoped that putting some money down would help motivate me, setting myself a goal of doing 1 course per month.

In the end, I finished 20 of the 24 courses I started.

There’s no way I could review all of them so I’m going to highlight my favourites in case anyone else wants to give 21Draw a chance.

What makes a good course

There are a few key points that make me view a course positively:

• Homework assignments feel worth my time and are present (I’m not building my 10th moodboard)
• Lessons are short and have a take away (1 hour of watching someone paint isn’t my jam)
• Something new is introduced

I was a little surprised at how many of the courses didn’t have any homework and how lots of the illustrations were just watchings someone else work. You can definitely learn a lot from watching someone else work but if they aren’t well set up to show you the settings, brushes and techniques they are using, the take-aways are limited.

I also grew tired of how many courses started with the bare minimum of “this is how you use procreate”. It’s good the first time around, or when an artist explains a more complex or less used feature. But I think 21Draw could benefit from a series of “intro to software” lesson where the basics are covered in a stand alone course and then each artist doesn’t need to repeat the same info in the lessons.

Top 5 courses

Storytelling with illustration:

Great at introducing ways to change the feel and story of the scene by using things like perspective, foreground background, and colour.

How to Stylize Characters:

I wasn’t familiar with the process of starting from silhouettes before and this has very much changed my way of thinking about character and creature design. And now that I’ve seen it here I’m starting to see it everywhere from professional concept artists I watch. Just some really great, instantly applicable tricks to make your piece more interesting.

Designing fun animal characters:

While this introduces a rather simple process for drawing cute characters, the base is really helpful for starting something new. Not only that, its limitations force you to become more creative with it.

Landscapes:

I knew nothing about landscapes before this course and now it’s become one of my most common art types of the year. I loved working in greyscale and the slow refinement process that’s introduced really helps make landscapes less intimidating.

Mastering lighting:

I thought I had a pretty good grasp of light but this course taught me I knew nothing. Covers the terminology for different kinds of light and shadows while showing how to incorporate them into a piece. I had no idea what Mask layers were for before this.

Intro to animation:

After watching multiple intro to animation videos this year I feel like I can confidently say that this one does a good job of covering the main concepts of 2d animation. The assignments were good and I felt like I took away a lot of new knowledge from this one.

Fav art pieces of the year

Final feelings on 21Draw

I’m extremely happy with my 21Draw purchase. There was certainly a variety of quality when it came to the courses. It felt like some had more support than others when being made. And if you take a lot of intro level courses you end up hearing the same intro level content on repeat. It’s a gamble I was willing to take, with the decent sized catalogue of courses there was always something new to try if there was a course that wasn’t working for me.

I won’t be renewing my subscription for a 2nd year as I think there’s only 10 courses left that I haven’t checked out. I’m eyeing up the learning platform Domestika for my 2024 learning. I do plan to keep an eye on 21Draw releases over the next year, and if they get a few more interesting ones I could see signing up again in the future for the next content.

However, one major thing has stood out while doing this year in review. I have much fewer completed pieces than I would like.

This is mostly my fault, I didn’t do all the assigned homeworks and baulked at having to do 1 full illustration for a course instead of smaller pieces or homeworks. So while Domestika looks really fun, I’m also considering doing a few months of focused practice instead of focused learning.

21Draw was a great way to re-familiarize myself with the basics and also many of the steps of the process I never learned. But when a course is 7 hours long and it’s mostly just watching someone else work, that 7 hours I don’t spend drawing myself.

I think for January I’m going to try to follow a practice schedule, specifically the one Jacob Drawfee goes over in this Drawclass: Jacob's No Pressure Guide to Learning How to Enjoy Art Practice.

It boils down to trying to draw 5 days out of the week, with a specific focus for the week and what to do each day. I’d love to say I’ll commit to a year of it but that feels rather intimidating at the moment. Especially with a few projects and volunteer programs in the works for 2024. So we’ll see how far I can get. And if each week might make for a worthy blog post.