The Library: Artist Resources

• Art Advice, Nathan's Thoughts, Not Art, Other Creators • learning, resources

These are some of the most valuable resources I have encountered on my artistic journey: they’ve offered much needed guidance and have helped set my course. To give more context a few of the links will go to articles on my blog.

Library Frederic Pillot
Image credit: Frederic Pillot

Live Demos, Sage Advice

Mastery in Real-time – beyond seeing great finished artwork, there’s nothing to light a fire under you like watching masterful artists create in real-time, and share their thought processes. Here is a selection of my own influences:

Advice, Interviews & Artist Profiles

  • Finished, Not Perfect, Jake Parker – Just Do It! Embrace your current skill level; be a master of whatever level you’re at. Create stuff, build momentum, study as you go and learn from others; keep at it and you will improve.
  • The Secret of Simple Forms, Marshall Vandruff – Here I think Marshall wonderfully lays out the basics of form drawing in relation to perspective. This information will especially benefit beginners trying to wrap their minds around the concept of drawing from memory and imagination, why it is so difficult to do, and how to train it; but even if you’ve drawn for years, but have never tackled this subject, Marshall will offer valuable insights.
  • You Need a Product, Not a Project, Jake Parker – experimenting and exploring are valuable activities for artists, but when trying to make deliberate progress, specificity is key.
  • SELF TAUGHT ARTIST SECRETS AND STRATEGIES, Trent Kaniuga – I think this is a nice introduction to Trent; he’s a super generous concept artist; he teaches so much value on his YouTube channel.
  • Tim Mcburnie’s Strategy For Learning To Draw – creating and studying are two oars of the same row boat; with only one you just go in circles. Rather than doing loads of isolated exercises, integrate what you learn into your process and finished work ASAP.
  • Karl Kopinski’s Thoughts on Photorealism – I love Karl’s response to a questions about style vs realism.
  • Greg “Craola” Simkins’ Artistic Process – I really enjoyed hearing Greg describe his creative process; I’m a huge fan of his work.
  • A background painting tip that saved me tons of time, David Revoy – really, you don’t need all that detail!
  • Michael Spooner – Visual Development artist. Fantastic artwork and sage advice.
    Spooner talks with Vilpuu!
    Spooner on The Breakthrough Creative
  • The Draftsmen Podcast – I think this is a classic that should definitely be preserved in the archive for generations to come. Listening to Stan and Marshall banter about art is both insightful and delightful.
  • Schoolism interviews – Bobby Chiu has interviewed a ton of artists over the years; they used be openly available on his YouTube channel, but are now only accessible with a Schoolism account. A couple of my favourite interviews were with Heri Irawan and Devin Elle Kurtz; there are many more great ones. It is really enjoyable to hear artists share their journey; great to listen to while doing low-concentration work or just chilling.
  • 3-Point Perspective Podcast, School of Visual Storytellers – Jake, Lee, and Will have some really great insights into being a professional artist.
  • Pete Beard’s illustration series – this is a great way to learn about a variety of illustrators throughout history.
  • Grand Portfolios, Character Design References – I have discovered so many amazing artists here.
  • How to Think When You Draw Tutorials, The Etherington Brothers – tons of specific insights on how to draw tons of stuff.

Art Courses

  • Nathan Fowkes’ Pictorial Composition – I learned a great deal of foundational knowledge from this course. Fowkes teaches some very helpful universal principles for composing images with a hands-on approach.
  • Marshall Vandruff’s Perspective Course – I have not taken this course, but I did take Marshall’s old course for $12. This one is considerably more costly, but Marshall has invested countless hours into fine-tuning his approach to teaching perspective in the 3 decades since his first course. I can’t help but anticipate that this will be fantastic!
  • Line and Color Academy – Tim McBurnie helps you build a solid process to reliably get your ideas onto the page/screen; create a positive relationship with the creative process and just keep levelling up.
  • Human Anatomy Fundamentals – when I’m ready to dive back into learning to draw people, this is the resource I plan to follow. Joumana Medlej lays a solid foundation beginning with seeing and drawing the energy of your subject as the foundation for the structural, anatomically correct body to stand on.

Art Books

There are many great recommendations from industry pros. I’ll list the ones I’ve actually read and found helpful (I’ve not read many):

  • Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud – as a disclaimer, before reading this book I don’t think I’d read a single comic book in my life; I had no appetite for them, but so many pros recommended this book that I decided to get it. A comic itself, this book opened my eyes to the power and great potential of telling stories with pictures and words. Great stuff!
  • Picturepedia, DK – this is a great reference book for . . . everything! 360 hard-bound pages of high-res photos. I love to use it to get specific direction and inspiration for my work. You only wanted reference for a butterfly? Well, which of the 47 species best suits the design you’re creating!? This book is picture-heavy with tons of examples! Love it!

Writing Advice

  • HOW TO WRITE A SCENE | elements of narrative + tips (with example doc), ShaelinWrites – I started learning to write fiction with BREX and was super frustrated that all my writing was only summaries of the story; Shaelin taught me how to write a scene which totally opened up my capacity to write engaging stories by expanding time and allowing the reader to experience the action through different kinds of story beats.
  • 3 Line NPC Method, Johnn Four – Johnn introduced me to character-driven stories and his 3-line method gave me a fantastic framework for concisely writing characters with depth and interest. I created a random generator to assist me in employing this method; it is my go-to approach whenever I need a new character for my story; I have a lot of fun with it and create characters in advance for my character library so that when I need a character I have an interesting selection to choose from. (also see my 3-line NPC Generator article)

Business Advice

Honourable Mentions

To Be Sorted

These are additional resources I’ve found to be highly valuable, but have not yet integrated into the meat of the listings above.

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