Hey Guys! Been a minute, sorry about that! I definitely have some posts in mind, but I don't have quite enough time to delve into them yet. In the meantime, I recently signed up for 21Draw, and I thought it might be a good idea to share my thoughts on using it so far. Before I joined, I wanted to be sure it was worth it for me, so I kind of did a lot of research.. which I thought might be nice to share! This will probably be a smaller post, but hey, it's better than nothing!
If you wanna check it out, go here:
To start, let's talk about what it is! 21Draw is a site full of courses, similar to Skillshare, but specifically for artists. It has courses from lots of really well known artists, like Tom Bancroft and Aveline Stokart! The tutorials cover lots of different topics, and while there are definitely courses that are applicable to traditional art, there are also some specific to digital art, just as a warning.
As for the price, this is what kept me from signing up before. For a full year's subscription to 21Draw's "Masterclass Membership", the usual price is $199 USD ($16.99 for a Month by Month subscription) which is… a lot. BUT, as I've come to realize, it's not abnormal for them to run pretty big discounts on this price. I was able to get the year membership for only $50, which seems to still be running by the way! So if you can find a time to grab a membership while a deal is running, that's probably the best way. Not that I don't think the price is necessarily worth it, because these are some really big artists, but just that it's a lot of money.
There is actually a free course you can take before you sign up to check out what it's like, "Character Design Brief: The Male Superhero" with Tom Bancroft. The full 50 min course is available for free on 21Draw, but personally, this was the course I was the least Interested in. I felt like it wouldn't be the best way to find out if I was really wanting to buy the full membership.
But, what I realized is you can actually click into the paid courses and see previews of different parts of each course. I'm a huge fan of Aveline Stokart. So I clicked into her course on Lighting and realized that Section 4's video is available for free as well, which was 10 mins of her 2 hour course to check out. Definitely look around the specific courses you're interested in to see if there are any parts for free or previews of the course.
You can also buy individual courses, so keep that in mind! The price of an individual course depends on the length of the videos, so you'll have to check each one. But if you're only Interested in a few courses, it might be better just to buy them individually.
Anyway, the 10 minutes I watched honestly sold me. I tried Skillshare years ago, but it (at least the class I took) felt a lot like a standard YouTube tutorial video. There was nothing that made it feel especially worth the price. Now of course, Skillshare has classes on all kinds of things, so that may pull you to it. But for me, I definitely prefer 21Draw so far for art specific classes. Aveline explained so much so well, in a really short amount of time. I could see her advanced knowledge about the topics she was discussing really easily. And honestly, I like the big names involved with all of these courses.
I was pretty much sold on it at this point, but I wanted to figure out how much I'd really be getting for the price. Below is a list of all the courses currently available on 21Draw, as well as their instructor and duration.
Drawing a Female Character in Procreate
Meike Schneider, 1 Hr
Introduction to Animation
Tom Bancroft, 2 Hr
Introduction to Stylized Characters
Maria Malandrino, 3 Hr
Mastering Lighting + Shading
Aveline Stokart, 2 Hr
Gesture Drawing
Warren Louw + David Rousel + Genzoman, 9 Hr
Draw a Cartoon Character
Maria Malandrino, 1 Hr
Digital Drawing in Procreate
Erika Wiseman, 2 Hr
Character Driven Illustrations
Kenneth Anderson, 3 Hr
Environment Design
Micheal Bills + Kenneth Anderson, 8 Hr
Character Design
Kenneth Anderson, 4 Hr
Make your Art Shine
Maria Malandrino, 1 Hr
Social Media for Artists
Erika Wiseman, 2 Hr
Character Design Brief: Superhero
Tom Bancroft, 1 Hr (Free Course)
Creature Design
Loopydave + Kenneth Anderson , 6 Hr
Posing for Character Design
Jeffrey Cruz, 4 Hr
Bring your Characters to Life
Rogdon, 2 Hr
Fundamentals of Drawing
Maria Malandrino, 3 Hr
Fundamentals of Character Design
Randy Bishop, 2 Hr
Stylized Figure Drawing
Rene Cordova, 4 Hr
That's 19 courses currently, approximately 60+ hours of content! Plus, new courses are added every two months, so the collection keeps getting bigger. I wanted to list all this info about the courses Because, if there's one thing I'd complain about with 21Draw so far, it's that it can be a bit confusing to see a good list of every course. It's easy when you haven't signed in with a Membership yet, you can easily scroll to see them all on the page where you can sign up.
But once you're a member, you can only see videos in sections. For example, a section with all courses related to Animation, to Procreate, etc. The problem is that you can't easily see them all at once, sometimes you don't know where a video might be hidden under, and occasionally the courses apply to two separate sections. So getting an accurate count of all the courses was tricky. I thought sharing it might be helpful!
I also want to mention quickly that 21Draw also has multiple art tutorial books for sale. They're listed below:
The Character Designer
The Illustrator's Guidebook
Learn from 100 Famous Artists
(I'll let you look into the prices, because it changes with sales a lot, you can get different bundles, and the hard cover and ebook price is different. So it'd be a lot of prices to list.)
The reason I bring the books up is because they also look pretty cool and I kinda just wanted to bring them to your attention! I honestly haven't heard a ton about these books, but they look really great. They're all written by multiple very well known artists, and I'd really like to get my hands on one someday!
Lastly, before I dive into what my first course was like, I also wanted to mention that a subscription also gives you a monthly newsletter, which comes with some fun freebies.
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I wanted to take at least 1 course before I recommended 21Draw, and I did! I completed Meike Schneider's full course, "Drawing a Female Character in Procreate"! Now I definitely don't want to spoil her course, but I did wanna talk about how it was to complete a whole course.
I love Meike, so that's one reason I chose this course first, but I also did it because I knew it was Procreate focused and also a beginner's level class. I'm certainly far from an expert at using Procreate, but I have been using it for over a year so I'm not sure I'm a beginner either. An intermediate level Procreate user who is really bad about exploring new tools as opposed to using the same ones always. So, I was concerned that the course would have no new information to offer me.
What I was hopeful for, is that unlike the Skillshare class I took, the course would focus less on the rules of Procreate, and more on Meike's specific way of using Procreate, and her overall art process.
I'd say this course did just that! There were obviously some parts that introduced basic Procreate functions, but the focus of the class was more about the way that Meike uses Procreate's tools in her own art, and how you can approach each step of the art in the same way she does. This is definitely what made the course the most interesting. It wasn't just explaining what each tool did, but showing how she chooses to use it and how that can benefit your artwork. There was also a lot of great information about improving your poses, color theory, and the benefits of using reference.
The course was split up into multiple shorter videos, which seems to be the format for all of these courses. It makes it easy to start and stop, as some courses are reaching 9 hours and you're not going to want to do it all in one go. At the break of each of Meike's videos, she had a bit of "homework" for you to do based on the subject of that video. For example, when she discussed how she chooses colors, she ended the video suggesting we choose the color palette for our piece (that she suggested we start in the first video) by using 3 separate methods she mentioned, and then to choose our favorite after testing them out.
There are also resources you can download with each course. Meike's were mainly the homework and a list of her preferred brushes, but I noticed on Aveline's course that you could download actual Procreate and Photoshop files.. interesting. I wonder what they include!
Here is the art I ended up making to fulfill all the homework portions and use Meike's tips. I absolutely love how it turned out! I followed a lot of her suggestions, and most of them are probably gonna stay around in my typical art steps! I was actually so happy with this, and the steps I took with it, that I made a little tutorial, which I'll show below:
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Anyways, I thought I'd just share my thoughts on 21Draw so far because I honestly haven't seen too many people discussing it. I would definitely recommend it so far. I enjoy that it is art focused and the format of the courses. I'm really excited to take more! I hope this could help explain what you're really getting for the price! I know this is a pretty small post, I hope to have something else up soon, but it needs just a little bit more work before it's ready. Until then, thanks for reading!
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