Beginner's Guide to Art Fundamentals

This course is a series of lectures that I’ve put together with the sole purpose of creating an easy onboarding experience for anyone interested in improving their art skills. Many people, including me, have felt very lost when wanting to start improving their art. These lectures are meant to supply students with a smooth, straightforward baseline for where to start.

Not only will this course teach you many of the basic principles of what I personally consider to be the primary fundamentals of art, but I also share recommended resources that helped me along my journey as well as suggestions for assignments to do on your own time to help better understand each fundamental.

To ensure that this course is for you I’ve provided a long introductory video that will express everything I go through in the lectures as well as insight into the art industry.

The courses included go over the following information, which is a must for anyone interested in improving their artwork:

• Anatomy: The study and practice of understanding the muscular and skeletal structures of an animal or human. If you’ve ever wanted to draw characters, creatures, portraits, cute chibi animals, anything really, anatomy is a must to have a basic understanding of. I discuss all of the general aspects of anatomy including gesture, proportions, perspective, construction, and exaggeration.

• Values: These videos will go over how to see things without color and instead view things as if they were in greyscale. I offer various tips and valuable information as to why being able to identify thing within values is so important to image-making.

• Color/Light: Color is so important to help capture emotion in your images. I help define basic terminology as well as discuss all the basic ins and outs of color theory and how colors can affect us psychologically.

• Perspective: one of the most overlooked fundamentals of art is perspective, however it is one of the most important fundamentals. Everything we see in the world follows some form of perspective, it’s how we translate what we perceive onto a flat 2-dimensional canvas. It’s a hefty, complicated subject but I offer many tips and tricks and advice to help understand and simplify the knowledge so that you can get started.

• Composition: Composition is how images are arranged, whether it’s of a cool buff warrior guy or of a bunch of dots on a canvas. The order and positioning of shapes on the canvas plays a big part in how we perceive things and the way that it makes us feel when seeing images. It sounds very artsy and high brow, but I try my best to keep things approachable and offer easy solutions to get you to start practicing composition immediately.

• Studying Techniques: At the end of every section I go over ways that you can start practicing these fundamentals right now. I also show my own personal progress and growth as an example of how effective these practices can be.

Music Credits in the videos: Dyalla, Bensound