There's been at least one beginning artists' thread in this forum before, but it had some problems with direction and differing skill levels, etc. I'm trying to revive the idea under a different banner, using a series of free lessons available here:
http://drawabox.com/with its accompanying subreddit here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/What is this?In short, it's a free re-telling of a visual composition course taught at the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena California. The fellow who made and runs drawabox and /r/artfundamentals is a graduate of the course who offers an abbreviated version of it over the internet in his spare time. If you're curious, the professional course is available online and listed
here, though it's full for this Fall and I don't have $750 to spend anyway.
How is it different from other lessons?This version is written by a programmer and broken down into tiny steps, starting with "how to draw a line." It doesn't get more basic than that. It's a simple progression designed for people who have never touched another art class in their lives but still want to learn. The problem with free art lessons online that I ran into is they all assume some basic knowledge or skill, and finding the right lesson to match my (nonexistent) skill level was really hard. This series end-runs around that. There's also another very interesting hook to it:
This is already designed as a group effort.The subreddit I linked above is the internet version of a homework board. People who want to can post their work and get it critiqued, but everyone else can also take a look and learn from their successes and failures. There's a ton of feedback available for most of the lessons already, and even without submitting for critique, you can use others' work to more effectively develop your own. There's also extra notes available in the sidebar.
So what's this thread for?Mostly to plug the free course, I suppose. But I was planning to post my work on the sub eventually, and figured if people would be more comfortable among other Bay Watchers, it might be worth making a thread for that here so we can collaborate on a smaller, cozier scale.