The Science of Deciding What You Should Draw

I teach beginners the fundamentals of drawing, and the question I get most often is this: What the hell am I supposed to draw?

It's easy to understand why beginners think that as you get better at the technical aspects of drawing, you'll automatically get better at coming up with things to draw - and when that doesn't happen, those same students get frustrated and fed up, thinking that *they're* the problem. That they're just not creative.

We all know that drawing is a skill that can be improved through practice and exercise. Ideation - the process of coming up with ideas - is no different. The problem is that people look at it like it's some kind of magic spell. It's not.

In this course, I'm not going to teach you how to draw. Instead, we're going to look at how to think about *what* we draw. We'll look at generating ideas from "scratch", taking vague notions and refining them into concrete designs, and producing work that can participate in a greater pipeline to create tangible products.

This course is broken into two main parts:

Part 1: Lectures

In a series of very short videos, we're going to look at what design really is, how it differs from illustration, and how by breaking the overall problem of "drawing" into a series of smaller skills, we can target and train them more effectively. We also look at the idea of tools - what they are, and how they can be used to do the heavy lifting, to free us up to focus on the creative aspects to our work.

Part 2: Concepts in Action

As I work through a series of set dressing paintovers for a personal project of mine, I'll talk you through a variety of problems I encounter, and how I think through each one. While I will primarily focus on design choices - which objects I place in the scene, how I arrange them, and how I think about the spaces I'm creating - I'll inevitably talk about compositional choices and concepts as well. There's also a couple anecdotes in there from my experience working in the game industry.

Raw footage for the three paintover videos (totalling over 13 hours) will also be included, so you can see every little thing I do, but the main videos of the course have been streamlined to keep on point without wasting your time.