13 posts tagged with "21draw"

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.

Towards the end of 2022 I had already started thinking of 2023 as a year I wanted to make more of an effort to get back into drawing. I missed being creative and hated watching my large collection of expensive markers slowly dry out and die.

While browsing Twitter one night I saw an artist I followed had recently published an art course on 21Draw. I'd never heard of the website before and was surprised to see that it was possibly the perfect fit for my 2023 goals. Online art lessons focused on core skills and even digital tools I was already familiar with.

I don't usually like buying something as soon as I see it but I got sucked in by the countdown clock at the top of the page promoting an End of Year Discount. 2 subscriptions for 1/3rd the price of a normal signal subscription. And I only had 5 hours left to take advantage!

So anyway, 30 minutes after finding the site I was registered and ready to go with a whole year of access.

While I was very excited to get to the courses focused on character design, Clip Studio, and Procreate, I forced myself to choose a beginner course as my first lesson. Then after the first lesson to stick to some core lessons like anatomy and perspective. So basically figure drawing all the time.

I'm now entering month two and I'm finding my time to devote to course material fading. Balancing two D&D campaigns, other hobbies, and drawing is still a struggle. But thanks to the February drawing challenged called #Funguary over on Twitter I'm still putting in some drawing time every few days. Just a little less focused then I'd like it to be. I'll talk about #Funguary in my next post.

Hoping that in March I'll have more then just a few figure drawing sketches to share.