The Ultimate Digital Painting Course
I was still loosely following the old Radiorunner Curriculum so looking back at my spreadsheet trying to figure out what to talk about next. This was the next thing mixed in with DAB and Proko’s portrait videos on youtube.
Right after I started DAB, I was struggling to do any kind of drawing from imagination. So like artists starting out I spent a lot of time googling “how to draw from imagination.” I also read a lot of reddit posts and eventually stumbled upon The Ultimate Digital Painting Course by Austin Batchelor on Udemy.
I think the course does a great job of going through the basics of digital painting. It’s very long and thorough. Austin Batchelor doesn’t seem to be a rockstar social media personality though like your Proko, or Ahmed Aldoori. Austin Batchelor and his brothers (who also work on the course) are working artists though, or at least were before becoming full-time art teachers.
It seemed like a good way to break out of the monotony of doing DAB and not lose my mind or burn out.
I found the course overall pretty good. There is demo for each concept then homework. Due to the overwhelming number of students, feedback is nothing more than copy & pasted comments such as “Great work!” Austin Batchelor did address this by saying (and I’m paraphrasing) that just responding to comments had become a full-time job and they couldn’t even work the course or produce new courses so they hired some people to respond to the comments. It is what it is I guess. I think it’s easy enough to see how well you did and watch the video again if you didn’t get it. Most art feedback I’ve seen online is worthless anyway. A lot of people one reddit, and even some teachers, are just not good at explaining or discussing technique or giving useful critiques. Also as a beginner sometimes even if you get a good critique it might be hard to understand what to do with it. The best you can hope for is paint overs where the artist shows you what they would have done. Not on this course though.
To be fair, there is a very lively discord now, so the possibility of getting interaction and feedback from the community has gotten better. It was started after I finished the course though, so I haven’t really participated in it. I kind of used these types of courses now so I’m not really turned off by lack of feedback. There are other places to get it.
I spent a year slow chipping away at the projects on this course. I started in summer of 2020 and finished in the summer of 2021. When I finished I was also in the middle of Term 3: Unit 15, Figure drawing 3 of the Radiorunner Curriculum and I was starting the 25 wheel challenge on DAB.
Here is a look at some stuff I did through this course.
Interestingly, the Batchelor brothers have a character design course, which I also did. I’ll have to make a separate post about that one too.
Looking back at these I feel a lot better about doing the course, however I never produced anything like this outside it. Perhaps that’s my fault though. I feel like I fell into tutorial syndrome where I could follow along with someone, but not create anything on my own. Perhaps another issue with having ADHD, without anyone to tell me what to do next I often have trouble executing. I enjoyed the course and because of it I got really comfortable with Clip Studio Pro which I used for all the painting.
Do I think the course was worth it? For the price, when you buy it during the ever present sales these sites have, yes. It goes over all the fundamentals of digital painting. My one criticism is that it glosses over some things, for example the metallic and glass surface lessons, then never uses those concepts again. It’d have been nice if they all built off of the previous lesson so by the end you have used all that knowledge over and over. You could argue that I should have incorporated that stuff myself, and you’re right. I wish I would have done that. That’s something I will try to do in the future for sure. Another downside of the course maybe that it tries to do too much, and it might be better for beginner artists to focus on one type of painting at a time. I still think for the price, it’s a pretty good way to get into digital painting.
As with most courses like this whether they are on Udemy, or Domestika (and I’ve done my fair share of Domestika courses too), you need to be self-motivated otherwise you won’t finish. My regret is that I wish I had made digital painting a regular part of my daily drawing because I feel like I lost some of these skills by not continuing to practice them daily.
