Hi @rwarner , welcome! They are planning to do a curriculum soon to help with which classes to take and in what order. Those two classes are the ones I started with! Still figuring it out as I go, but here is the course order recommended by Jake Parker when this question has come up in the past:

PHASE 1: Fundamentals:
HOW TO DRAW EVERYTHING
DRAWING FUNDAMENTALS
VISUALIZING DRAWING IN PERSPECTIVE
LIGHT AND SHADOW
MASTERING PERSPECTIVE
CREATIVE COMPOSITION

PHASE 2: Learning Digital
BEGINNING PHOTOSHOP
10 STEP DIGITAL PAINTING

PHASE 3: Color
WORKING WITH COLOR
PAINTING COLOR AND LIGHT
PAINTING IN PHOTOSHOP

PHASE 4: Characters
DRAWING HEROES AND SIDEKICKS
DRAWING ANIMALS
DRAWING VILLAINS AND MONSTERS
POSING CHARACTERS - CHILDREN'S BOOK EDITION
STYLIZING HUMAN CHARACTERS
BREATHING LIFE INTO YOUR CHARACTER DESIGNS

PHASE 5: Illustration
CREATIVE ENVIRONMENT DESIGN
VISUAL STORYTELLING TECHNIQUES
MIXED MEDIA-WATERCOLOR AND DIGITAL
LUMINOUS LIGHTING IN MIXED MEDIA
ILLUSTRATING CHILDREN'S BOOKS PART1

Also watch all the critique sessions you can. You'll learn a TON from those. There's hours of critiques we did for 3rd Thursday webinars you can see here.

And watch the demos too. There's a lot to learn there as well.

Hope that helps!

You may want to think about doing Open Edition and/or Limited Edition prints. Normally small prints (around 8x10) are Open Edition. You can sell them cheap and as many as you want. Large archival fine art prints are usually Limited Edition. They must be numbered and signed. It is more exclusive and can sell them at a higher price. This depends on your art and your customer base. I offer both.

Also to consider when you decide to do your own prints is how to ship it. I ship mine flat because I was never good at rolling prints. I always put a crease in it no matter how careful I am. If you are matting your print, it'll have to be shipped flat obviously. Shipping it flat means having extra backing boards to keep it from getting bent. Which means the package is heavier and costs more. For me, the hardest part of doing prints was figuring out the fulfillment part. Finding the right envelopes, learning how to calculate shipping costs, and scheduling when to pack and getting it out. I'm still trying to find a better way.

Some days I contemplate on if I should use INPRINT or other print-on-demand services... You don't make as much but you don't spend as much.

Actually although 360 isn’t something I’m yet into, I have made one or two animated stories....or rather animated my illustrations and they’ve brought in more work.

So much so that as adobe have a Black Friday deal on their membership I’m going to expand my photo subs to get the full suite. Does mean though learning yet more software, but as long as I only dive in to what I need - after effects, premier, animation and expand my illustrator knowledge - I should be ok.

And as I’ve got a meeting to discuss creating an animation this Wednesday, should pay for itself.

Deal is until 24 nov if anyone is interested, 20% off

And animated pics I think is more accurately called motion graphics artist. Just bought a book on it this morning.

Oh, and just to say, you can do a load with Procreate and LumaFusion software straight on the iPad!

@rcartwright Thank you, they have a lot of resources to look through, I'll check them for sure!

@amelia-bothe I am sure you are fine with working on your painting and then submitting. The point this month is to take your time and make it the best you can. Don't forget to post your progress along the way, it helps getting feed back from the community. Good Luck!

@tessw I’d never have guessed that spelling in a million years! Cheers!

Have a look on Ebuyer, they have some monitors. I got a dell ultrasharp about 7 years ago and its still as good as new so I can vouch for the quality, but there are much cheaper alternatives available now, and the dells are cheaper nowadays too. My sister has the 24 inch dell ultrasharp which is also very good and rotates as well as tilts. They come ready calibrated with colour preset profiles- adobe rgb which is handy.
There are loads of alternate monitors that would probably be great too https://www.ebuyer.com/store/Computer/cat/Monitors/subcat/24"-Monitors?sort=rating+descending

I'd invite any and all to participate in Slowvember (www.slowvember.com). It's the oppostite of inktober in that you pick one thing you really want to work on, then slow down and make it as good as you can.

The great part about inktober is it gets the pen moving. Awesome! BUT, there is a downside too. When finished with Inktober, most people end up with 31 pretty bad drawings. Or maybe some nice starts, etc. Regardless, don't confuse making lots of images with making good images.

Being busy is different than actually being productive. Its way too easy to settle on a daily prompt which you may or may not do very well at. At the end you don't have something that really moved you forward in a meaningful way. Which is why I started Slowvember. The goal is to really focus effort on something. Have you ever done a painting that took a month? If you haven't, then you are missing out. This work is hard and you have to confront your limits. When you are doing quick sketches, you never bump up against the edge of your ability. But with this, you will hit it quick.

Have you ever done a painting where you can say "This is as good as I can possibly do right now". It's tough and requires patience, and focus, and even simple things like understanding what kind of work you want to make.

So I recommend bailing on the daily prompts, slowing down, and making something good.

@leontine That is great I would not want to go before her,hope it works out well .Thanks anyway .

I have only 1 opinion: Art school will help you a lot. If you have time and money, go to art school. If you don't have time and money, don't. You can still learn by yourself and the internet.

I think they are working on more watercolor videos. I would love to see them too. I have been primarily digital since starting my kidlit journey, but am taking a watercolor class right now and hoping to start doing more work that incorporates traditional techniques. I was an oil painter before all of this, but I’m not interested in picking my oil paints back up, so I am starting from scratch with watercolors. I have always loved them and loved the effects you can achieve with water. 😊

hey @Laurie - I had a similar problem in the last few weeks when I got a new cintiq 13HD.
What it turned out to be was that I was connecting the hdmi plug into an hdmi port on my computer, but the hdmi port wasn't actually part of my graphics card (ie my graphic card only had display port and DVI ports on it and the existing HDMI port on the computer was extraneous to the graphics card). That meant I had to get an hdmi to displayport adapter to plug directly into the graphics card, and now it works perfectly! I'm on a pc and I know you are on a mac so you may not have this issue, but perhaps it gives you another idea to try?
Fingers crossed you can get it working ok!!!

@tessw That first link was the one I was thinking of, thanks! I'll watch both videos. Will Terry's channel is full of inspiration and useful shop talk. This project sounds like good experience to pick up even if it doesn't pan out - at least I'll learn how to conduct business with self-publishers.

Hello all, I was inspired by inktober and some great artists to learn to draw. I am going through Jake Parker's How to Ink lessons and using my work on it for instagram. I just got to the lesson on Line Weight, were I am inking one of his sketches. In the example PDFs, it shows using some hashes with the technical pen to show off dark areas. I have some smaller nibbed pens and was wondering if it made sense to continue to draw with a larger pen, 0.5 copic multiliner, or move to something smaller for that hatching? Obviously this is not for production work, but learning to draw/ink, so I am not sure which approach would help me learn more.

This is the image and some of my practice lines from an earlier exercise. I am really enjoying the pen work but hate the brush work.


I've been watching fewer courses lately but I remember being able to stop in the middle of a course, close the browser, and return later to where the video player remembered right where I left off and resumed the course from there. Recently, though, when I do this the video player restarts the lesson and I have to remember where I left off in the video either by content or the minute marking. Has anyone else noticed or is there a computer setting that I need to check? I've been mostly reviewing the Third Thursday lessons recently so I'm not sure if it just doesn't work for them and it still does for the traditional multi-video courses. Was there a memo I missed? Any help/guidance appreciated.

If you have full access then all the courses will show up in your dashboard. If you buy individual courses, then only those should show up.

Hi Jackie! I'm a little late to this party, but I thought I would mention that Squarespace has a free app for your iPad or iPhone that will automatically sync with any galleries that you have on your Squarespace website. This allows you to have your website images on your mobile device and you can display them even if you don't have internet connection. It is called Squarespace Portfolio and it updates when you update your website galleries so there is no double handling. I just discovered this and it's been really helpful for me, so I hope it helps you too!

@rcartwright Interesting. I never noticed I pointed elements out with warm colors, but now you mention it I see it. Thank you!

So....rather than doing an original painting and selling digital prints of it, you are doing real media copies of your own work?
If I understand right then yes, it works. I think there’s a Japanese industry based around it, which causes problems in the original art market elsewhere in the country. So they are basically masterwork copies.

I’v done it with some of my fast watercolour cartoons. Take about 10 mins to do and sell at £30each.
Lino prints and my speciality, woodblock, is closest to identical copies. But each is considered as an original work of art. Unlike giclee which is considered reproduction.
For sales, you’ll need a bit of romance around it. My woodblock prints have a romance about the technique, materials, and video of the process. Better than Lino. For your suggestion, I’d think about calling them a ‘series’. Recognising that each time you create the next ‘copy’ you will be refining your process and painting more instinctively, you should f;ind that the later copies are more energetic and lively than the earlier ones. Essentially the later ones will be better. So you could charge more.