01-03-2016, 03:59 AM
Hey man, cool to see the experimentation going on! Thanks for your comments in my SB too. Here's some comments about Watts atelier:
I ended up staying enrolled for 3 months, I did it solidly everyday for that time. I managed to get through the head drawing stuff and about 1/3 of the way through the figure stuff. It's all video demo's by Jeff Watts, who is really skilled. The videos are quite long and it's interesting to hear him talk but he has a tendancy to go off topic and sometimes just draws while talking about random art stuff without explaining his thought process. Other times he really explains everything he's doing and it is really useful.
The course is broken into phases and lessons within those, each lesson has an assignment which is great to do (some of them take a long time and have many drawings, so its great practice). You can submit them and get feedback but after a while I stopped doing that because the feedback seemed really rushed, it took ages to come, and mostly just one or two sentences that sometimes contradicted what he says in the videos (since it's his staff trying to mark hundreds of submissions every week there is a disconnect).
It is a really expensive site for online education without any good feedback but how he talks to you in the videos, you really do feel like his student, since you spend so much time with one guy and I felt really pumped to keep going and really positive about art in general.
I think the best thing about it though is that he teaches the Reilley rhythms in a lot of careful detail and shows how Loomis / Asaro / Skull / Reilly rhythms all come together (for the head) and how Loomis and other mannikins, simple shapes and the rhythms come together for the body (which apart from some really convoluted and confusing textbooks, I couldn't find much information on anywhere else online).
He also teaches a lot about edges and edge control. It's great stuff for any kind of entertainment artist but the focus is all on traditional, charcoal drawing on newsprint paper. I couldn't find cheap newsprint paper in the UK, the pads at my art store were around a tenner for 50 pages. It's not practical / cost effective to follow his method with charcoal pencil on newsprint for me, and the way he shows you really do need the newsprint paper. So in the end I just did it all in graphite. (You'd probably have the same issue in Ireland).
What else to say? I feel it was so worthwhile, even after dropping over £200 on it in just a few months I don't regret it at all.
Hope that's useful! Definitely try it for a month and see how it is.
I ended up staying enrolled for 3 months, I did it solidly everyday for that time. I managed to get through the head drawing stuff and about 1/3 of the way through the figure stuff. It's all video demo's by Jeff Watts, who is really skilled. The videos are quite long and it's interesting to hear him talk but he has a tendancy to go off topic and sometimes just draws while talking about random art stuff without explaining his thought process. Other times he really explains everything he's doing and it is really useful.
The course is broken into phases and lessons within those, each lesson has an assignment which is great to do (some of them take a long time and have many drawings, so its great practice). You can submit them and get feedback but after a while I stopped doing that because the feedback seemed really rushed, it took ages to come, and mostly just one or two sentences that sometimes contradicted what he says in the videos (since it's his staff trying to mark hundreds of submissions every week there is a disconnect).
It is a really expensive site for online education without any good feedback but how he talks to you in the videos, you really do feel like his student, since you spend so much time with one guy and I felt really pumped to keep going and really positive about art in general.
I think the best thing about it though is that he teaches the Reilley rhythms in a lot of careful detail and shows how Loomis / Asaro / Skull / Reilly rhythms all come together (for the head) and how Loomis and other mannikins, simple shapes and the rhythms come together for the body (which apart from some really convoluted and confusing textbooks, I couldn't find much information on anywhere else online).
He also teaches a lot about edges and edge control. It's great stuff for any kind of entertainment artist but the focus is all on traditional, charcoal drawing on newsprint paper. I couldn't find cheap newsprint paper in the UK, the pads at my art store were around a tenner for 50 pages. It's not practical / cost effective to follow his method with charcoal pencil on newsprint for me, and the way he shows you really do need the newsprint paper. So in the end I just did it all in graphite. (You'd probably have the same issue in Ireland).
What else to say? I feel it was so worthwhile, even after dropping over £200 on it in just a few months I don't regret it at all.
Hope that's useful! Definitely try it for a month and see how it is.