Mini-courses
Mini-courses
Short programs on a single subject: your first drawing, a sketch built from a shape, character concept, digital painting. Every mini-course comes with the Club plan — the program and the previews are open to everyone.
The Club plan is $33 a month. Choose a plan
Book illustration: your first spread
Seven lessons and more than seven hours of breakdowns: how a book is built, two characters, a storyboard of six scenes and one illustration taken all the way.
Character concept: my first hero
Six lessons in three modules: from the warm-up and the search for a silhouette to line art, color layouts and render. You finish with a character ready for your portfolio.
My first drawing
Three lessons and about an hour and a half of video: layout on the page, hatching, the shadow terminal. By the end of the week — a drawn apple that has volume instead of a traced outline.
Weapon concept: sea demon
Twelve lessons and the full concept artist pipeline: reading the image, a reference library, silhouettes, clean line art, color, render and an assembled concept sheet.
My first study: digital painting
Six lessons and about three hours: value and mass, brushstroke and edge, warm and cool. Two painted studies in a week — an apple and a pear.
Digital painting. Render
The second part of the digital painting course: color, light and complex setups. Seven weeks — a plaster head, a portrait, a cityscape, an interior and homework.
First steps in digital art
Twenty lessons and almost six hours: props, weapons and a stylized character. One pipeline — sketch, line, blocking, color, render — repeated on three pieces.
Blender basics
Ten lessons and a little over two hours: the Blender interface, modeling, UV unwrapping, textures and render. You finish with a stylized mushroom house.
Sketching from the mass
Twelve lessons on sketching from the mass: female and male portrait, a simple pose and a complex one. Breakdowns with timelapses, in pencil or in Procreate.
About the mini-courses
Each program is one topic and a finished piece at the end. The shortest is My First Drawing: three lessons from a blank sheet to solid form. The longest is Digital Painting. Rendering: a plaster cast head, a portrait, a city view in perspective and an interior composition. In between there is book illustration built on Little Red Riding Hood, a character concept and a weapon concept, sketching from a tonal mass, your first painted study, first steps in digital art and the basics of Blender.
Read moreCollapse
What sets a mini-course apart from a catalog section is that it has an ending. In a section the classes sit together by topic and can be watched in any order. Here the lessons run one after another and end with a finished thing: a book spread, a weapon concept sheet, a rendered mushroom house, a completed study. For someone who has been watching lessons for a long time and hasn’t finished anything in just as long, that matters more than any new theory.
In concept art it usually isn’t the rendering that breaks, it’s the silhouette. The character is assembled out of neat lines, but fill the figure with black and what reads is a coat rack with weapons on it: no character, no recognizable mass. That’s why both My First Hero and Sea Demon start from black shapes and the search for a readable sign, and color, highlights and materials come last. The same order runs through sketching from a tonal mass: mass and rhythm first, outline after.
If you have only been drawing for a short time, it makes sense to start with My First Drawing, and digitally with My First Study: six classes, after which you understand how a painted sketch is actually carried through. Rendering is worth taking once warm and cool and value relationships have stopped scaring you; otherwise the classes turn into copying someone else’s brush moves. Blender Basics stands apart: three weeks on a full 3D scene cycle, from the interface to the final render.
Mini-courses are part of the Club plan and aren’t sold separately; there is no one-off purchase of a single course. The program and the previews are visible without a subscription. Nobody checks homework here piece by piece: live feedback lives on the streams and in the marathon, while a mini-course is a recorded program you go through at your own pace and rewatch as often as you need.
FAQ
Can I buy a single mini-course?
No. They are all part of the Club plan, and the courses aren’t sold separately. Without a subscription you get the program description and the previews, so you can see what the course covers and how many classes it has.
How long does a course take?
The programs are built for one to three weeks at a couple of classes a week: First Spread, Sea Demon and Blender Basics run three weeks each, My First Drawing and My First Study one week each. The timing is a recommendation, there is no enrollment date to wait for, and all lessons are open from the start.
Do I need a graphics tablet?
For digital painting, concept art and first steps in digital art, yes — any program with layers and adjustable brushes will do. My First Drawing and sketching from a tonal mass can be done with a pencil. Blender doesn’t need a tablet, a mouse is enough.
How is a mini-course different from the lessons in the catalog?
The catalog is an archive of separate classes and streams sorted by topic. A mini-course is a sequence of lessons with one goal and a result at the end. The topics overlap in places, but in the catalog you pick a class for today’s question, while here you follow a program to a final piece.
What happens to my access if I cancel the subscription?
Auto-renewal is turned off from your account with one button, and access runs out the period you have paid for. After that the mini-courses close along with everything else in the subscription, which is why a course is better taken than saved for later.