21-day Environmental Design workout by Nathan Fowkes

As an illustrator I’m often asked to draw or paint a variety of things so continual learning is a must.

Backgrounds are a skill I always felt I could improve so I decided to finally put my head down and try and plow through the 21-day Environmental Design workout by Nathan Fowkes offered by Schoolism, an online subscription-based artistic education. It probably won’t be my last as it was definitely an eye-opener to all the different approaches of backgrounds Nathan showed.

With the exception of a few lessons, each video was approximately an hour long. Nonetheless I found it took me much longer to paint, sometimes 3 to 4 hours or more. Following Nathan was a bit of a challenge for me as he flit about the digital canvas, rapidly changing brushes, and following along the applied adjustment layers. I found myself pausing and rewinding often.

While Nathan doesn’t provide the brushes themselves, he walks you through most of his settings. When the opportunity arose, it was easy enough to take a snapshot of the brush on screen and duplicate the configuration. One thing I noticed that would occasionally throw me off was brush strokes suddenly appearing as if some frames leading to them had been dropped although the narration did not suffer from it. I would rewind to see if I blinked but I chalk it up to creative editing.

While the style is different than what I’m used to, I found it to be quite educational and will definitely incorporate some of the things I learned into my own work. Below are a handful of the studies I did of Nathan’s compositions. I don’t want to spoil it for others taking the course. I painted these all in Photoshop.

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Recent Studies, Recent Art

Sorry for the lack of blog updates these past months! I decided early this year to focus my efforts on learning and creating more artwork to add to my portfolio, stores and Instagram pages. I’ve also been helping out an animator with an informational video on a tight deadline. I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming post.

In order to produce more personal work, I began to set some time limits for myself for each piece and, as a result, I became much more efficient and produced more work in a few months than I did in an entire year. I realized a lot of what slowed me down in the past was overthinking things. Don’t get me wrong, I occasionally still do but I’ve been trying my best to push past it. I totally get that ubiquitous t-shirt phrase, Don’t Overthink It.

Letting go to draw whatever came to mind and trying out whatever style was also very freeing—I was coming up with ideas far more often. Too often, sometimes, but that’s a good thing, right? My main struggle these days is I have trouble trying to stick to a single subject matter and style because I love to explore. It would be nice to be recognized for my style. I’m not sure if I have one yet. Maybe one day.

Because I’m constantly trying to increase my knowledge of technique, I followed some tips I picked up from my Schoolism classes and I started to do more light studies, studies of animals, action poses and backgrounds. I began to notice improvement to my finished pieces which I’ll save for another post. I felt like I was able to produce them a little more easily than I had in the past. Although I was pleased at how some of them turned out I know there will always be room for growth. I did start to think: Wow, did I really do that? There was a time when I would make numerous studies and still feel like I wasn’t advancing. I was embarrassed to share them so often I didn’t. To me they weren’t good enough—I made the mistake of comparing myself to others. We are often hardest on ourselves, right? I’ve since changed my perspective and instead try to learn from those artists I admire. Below are some of the studies I’ve been doing this year.