Clint and Diana here with this month's news, sales, and features!
SALES AND SEATS
Winter courses with feedback are starting soon, but you can still sign up to snag a last minute spot! We still have 2 seats available for our new class FORM RENDERING! To register, click here.
Of course you can always purchase a self-study class anytime and learn at your own pace.
It's a great time to get some digital painting training because we are running a SPECIAL NEW YEAR’S SALE on DIGITAL PAINTING BASICS! Get started on your digital art path with this foundational class! Perfect for self-taught artists with no training and those who have never used Photoshop. Available now for $125!
That’s a $70 savings! Click here to register.
Private consultations are back! You can now book both 30 minute and 1 hour sessions with an Academy Instructor here.
STUDIO NEWS
Since announcing the launch of Swatches Studio, we have been inundated with applications and portfolios from many passionate artists interested in working with us. We really appreciate the enthusiasm and the courage from applicants, so willing to put themselves out there and share their work. We are working to send a thoughtful response to everyone, so if you haven’t heard from us yet, please be patient. In the meantime, if you are starting to put a portfolio together and want to maximize its effectiveness, we recommend picking up the Portfolio & Career Kit.
You can also gain some insight into what we value in a portfolio by watching some of our portfolio review videos on YouTube here.
EVENTS
Voting has closed on our Spring Art Challenge theme! “GOTHIC MONSTERS AND MONSTER HUNTERS” has been selected by the community!
We will be creating the briefs and putting together some reference material in the coming weeks to get everything ready for the Challenge launch. To stay informed on Art Challenge updates and be notified of when tickets go on sale, be sure to join our Discord by going directly to here.
In the meantime, you can watch the final critique and winner announcement video from our last Art Challenge here.
Congratulations (left to right) to Sven Puister, Anthony La Selva, and Tobey Tobella! They were our first, second, and third place winners in the Space Marine Challenge! Here were their final submissions:
COMMUNITY
Portfolio Review Livestreams are back! Catch our first livestream of the year on January 16th at 7pm CST here on the YouTube channel.
If you would like to submit your portfolio for video review, you can do so by joining our Discord and posting a link to your work in the video-critique-submissions channel.
Join the new Weekly Art Challenges on our Discord! January's theme is Legendary Props! Each week is a different prompt for you to design, or illustrate, and we'll feature our top looks in next months newsletter. This are free community challenges, there is no video feedback, or awards. The prompt list will be posted in the Swatches Challenges > Challenge Files room on Discord, and you can post your images (and WIPs) in the Challengers Space room.
Find the Discord here.
ALUMNI SPORTLIGHT
Our featured Alumni this month is Björn Röthig! Björn has put so much effort into building his skills and his hard work is paying off! Here is his latest piece, created in our Character Illustration class. We are also proud to say that Björn has recently joined our Swatches Studio team and is already hard at work on a AAA project. To see more of his illustration and concept work, check out his website here.
INSPIRATION
I’ve been a fan of Tony Sart’s character work for several years, but I only recently discovered his multi-figure scenes and they are amazing! Check out the image below - just wonderfully resolved, with nothing lost and nothing hidden. It's a perfect balancing act of a main focal point with lots of little moments around it while achieving plane separation and a pleasing composition that keeps the eye moving from character to character.
If you are interested in composing multi-figure scenes, you may want to spend some time analyzing Tony’s work - lots to learn here! You can check out his full portfolio here.
TIP OF THE MONTH
On Being Critical.
Often students look at a pro’s work and think “how is he/she so good??” and “why doesn’t my art look like that?”. As artists it’s easy to dismiss things as we’re working on a piece. The perspective is a little wobbly? Let’s just put it in shadow. The hands don’t look quite right? Let’s put them behind the character’s back or in his pockets. The pose is weird? Let’s just add more details to the costume, maybe no one will notice. While these may seem like little things, the more of these little things we sweep under the rug, the more the quality of an image suffers. Being tolerant of errors, even if not consciously so, is the difference between an amateur and a pro. The pro is more critical at every level, every fundamental is checked and corrected. He/she is less tolerant of errors. When I was starting out, I was always trying to get around foundational problems, trying to make them less obvious rather than resolve them. Trying to get away with it. It wasn’t until I changed that mindset that I started to hit a higher quality level with my images. The process of trying and trying to solve issues, breaking them down to their foundations and working them out, stopping to do a study if necessary, redrawing and repainting until it comes out right - that’s where the progress is. In life and in art, growth happens when we decide to no longer hide and cover up errors but to face them and correct them until those weaknesses are removed. When we do this, our skills and work reach new heights.
And that wraps up our news for January 2025! We appreciate your continued support. Thanks for subscribing and we will be back next month with more updates! 🎨🖌️
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