Hiya,
I hope you're having a good week so far. Today I thought I'd share the best online courses I have personally taken, because learning new skills is one of my favourite things…
The majority of these are on Skillshare, but fear not! If you don't use Skillshare HERE is a two week free trial! Plus if you are already signed up for Skillshare and loving it - I mean who isn't? HERE is 40% off your subscription!
Find Your Style: Five Exercises to Unlock Your Creative Identity
I love this course by Andy J. Pizza (who's a super great illustrator and creator of the Creative Pep Talk podcast). It's a wonderful approach to discovering your style and creative exploration in general. It's only just over an hour long, but if you're doing the class assignments be prepared, they will take time to do!
Adobe Photoshop CC – Essentials Training Course
So I'm cheating a little with this one, as I'm going to mention a bunch of courses here. But they're all by the same person, Daniel Scott, who has these amazing project based courses on the Adobe suite, including Illustrator, Photoshop, Premier, XD and InDesign
I took his essential and advanced courses in both Adobe Illustrator and Adobe photoshop courses, during the first lockdown last summer. Well, full disclosure, I'm still part way through Photoshop advanced, lol, but I will finish it at some point!
These courses are hefty, each course is 10-20 hours long, but I love how he approaches teaching these programs with short projects. It really helped to keep me engaged throughout the courses, and each project builds on skills from previous projects, which was great, as for me, learning is all about repetition.
Engraving Fast Track for Calligraphers
This is something I've been asked about a whoooole bunch recently…. How to engrave glass!
I always point anyone interested in learning engraving to this course. There are some health and safety factors that you need to be aware of when engraving, and I sure don't want to be responsible for someone injuring themselves!! Safety first people!
I know this course is designed for calligraphers, but the skills and techniques they teach can easily be transferred to other types of art. Also this class is created by two amazing calligraphers from Canada! Sylvia of @viacalligraphy and Jodi of @somedayartco you should go check out their work!
Botanical Drawing: Learn to Sketch Flowers, and Arrange in Adobe Illustrator
I love this Skillshare course from Lisa Glanz, who's an awesome illustrator. It covers both drawing IRL and then turning those sketches into vectors in Adobe Illustrator.
I found it handy to have some basic understanding of Illustrator for this course. Although Lisa does a great job of explaining what she's doing, it's easy to get a bit lost if you don't have some foundational Illustrator skills (you could always do Daniel Scott's Illustrator Essentials course first, like I did).
From Paper to Screen: Digitally Editing Your Artwork in Photoshop
And lastly there's this short but suuuuuuper useful Skillshare course! Cat actually has a bunch of great Skillshare courses, but I found this one particularly helpful. Being an artist that primarily works with pen and paper, learning how to turn artwork into high quality prints has been a game changer. Now I don't have to rely on someone else to do this for me, and I can print my own art prints at home. It's just so handy!
And don't forget that you can sign up for a free two week trial for Skillshare HERE and get 4 out of these 5 classes for free! And if you already have a subscription HERE's 40% off an annual subscription!
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