Some people think there’s an arbitrary marker where you’re finally a self-taught artist, that you eventually reach a point where you’re done with your art education. But I think we spend our whole lives learning, so my goal for my 37th year on earth is to start being a committed self-teaching artist.
I have so many interests I want to improve and learn that I can’t predict what my progress or end result will look like, but some of the things I want to explore are:
Sketching and drawing
Coloring techniques and color theory
Painting with watercolor and gouache
Painting on the Procreate app
Creative Journaling
Handwriting, hand lettering, and calligraphy
So I dug up a bunch of books and videos to make up a curriculum and planned out my own DIY art degree to start learning them all!
Each month has its own focus:
Learning About Learning Art
Mark-making, Sketching, & Basic Shapes
Perspective
Figure Drawing & Anatomy
Gesture Drawing
Character Design
Color & Light
Composition
Landscapes & Environmental Design
Using Markers & Colored Pencils
Painting with Gouache & Watercolor
Digital Art
I don’t have a syllabus for the full year planned out yet, but here’s a rough draft of the materials and activities I want to try out for Quarter 1:
❄️ January ❄️
✨January Focus: Learning About Learning Art✨
📚 January Materials 📚
Drawabox.com: Lesson 0
[Book] Art & Fear by David Bayles
[Book] Debt Free Art Degree. Foundations in Drawing by Marco Bucci: Chapters: 1
[Book] Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
[Book] How to Keep a Sketch Journal by Marisa Lewis
[Book] Sketching from the Imagination: An Insight into Creative Drawing by 3DTotal Publishing
[Book] Art Fundamentals: Theory in Practice by 3DTotal Publishing. Chapters: Fundamentals & Critical Thinking
[YouTube] Veritasium: The 4 Things it Takes to Be an Expert
[YouTube] Ian Roberts: 5 Principles to Master Anything
[YouTube] Proko: Getting Better Faster - Painting with 80/20 Rule
[YouTube] Proko: How to Hold and Control Your Pencil
[YouTube] Sycra: Iterative Drawing
[YouTube] Love Life Drawing: 10 Stages of Learning Any Art Skill
[YouTube] Love Life Drawing: Practice Like a Pro - How Steve Rude Improves
[YouTube] Sinix: Art Theory Tutorials Playlist
[YouTube] Sinix: Art Warm Up & Exercises
[YouTube] belartsy: the “right” way to start learning how to draw
[YouTube] Paintable: Sketching For Beginners
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: How to Draw Anything - The 7 Fundamentals
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: How to Draw Good Lineart
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: Stop Learning to Draw the Wrong Way
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: The Most Important Art Skill
[Book] The Lost Art of Handwriting by Brenna Jordan
[Book] Spencerian Handwriting: The Complete Collection of Theory and Practical Workbooks for Perfect Cursive and Hand Lettering by Platts Roger Spencer
[Workbook] New Spencerian Compendium Plate 2 Practice Sheets (Found on PDF Drive)
Hand lettering worksheets I made in Canva
This is by no means a comprehensive education, but I feel like I came up with a good introduction to the things I’m interested in. I’m not going to learn everything about all of these topics in just a year, and I know I'm not going to get through all the resources I found.
I also want to make this process as cheap as possible, so I’m using a lot of free stuff from YouTube and my local libraries. Many of the resources came from radiorunner’s Curriculum for the Solo Artist and suggestions I found through the almighty social media algorithms.
If your libraries can’t get the books on order or Inter-Library Loan, or if you’d rather just buy them to keep, I’m including Amazon affiliate links. (Many can be found as PDFs through other free methods but I definitely don’t recommend looking for the books on Demonoid, Mobilism, or PDF Drive.)
What do you think I'm missing? What do you think is too extra?
Learning is a life-long process, so even though I gave myself a year to restart, it’s just that: my restart.
I'm still trying to get used to gauging what a gouache color will look like when it's dried, and ran into a prime example this afternoon. I didn't expect the bushes to be as blue green as it ended up becoming (and I watered it down too much so the brush strokes are obvious and all over the place).
I'm torn on what direction to go now. I wanted to add in some shading but I got ahead of myself and started dotting in the flower field. I planned to use colored pencils for the flower centers and stems, so maybe doing greenery shading with the pencils instead of paint?
I think I'll put it on the back burner for a while and decide what to do with a fresh look later. Or maybe I'll write it off as an experiment and move on. Isn't that what a sketchbook is for anyways?
Well, I didn’t even start coming up with my plan until more than halfway through the month (and I just kept adding more and more every day) so it was a little too aspirational.
What I Planned
Check out my Q1 planning post to see what I intended to do for January!
What I Did
Here’s what I actually studied in the last couple of weeks in January, mostly in order:
Materials
[Book] Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon
[Book] Art & Fear by David Bayles
[Reddit] r/ArtistLounge: How to get better at observing the world around me?
[Book] Debt Free Art Degree: Foundations in Drawing by Marco Bucci. Chapters: 1.
[YouTube] Veritasium: The 4 Things it Takes to Be an Expert
[YouTube] Ian Roberts: 5 Principles to Master Anything
[YouTube] Proko: Getting Better Faster - Painting with 80/20 Rule
[YouTube] Love Life Drawing: 10 Stages of Learning Any Art Skill
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: How to Draw Anything - The 7 Fundamentals
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: Stop Learning to Draw the Wrong Way
[YouTube] Marc Brunet: The Most Important Art Skill
[YouTube] Uncomfortable: Drawabox Playlist (Lesson 0 Parts 1-5)
[YouTube] belartsy: the “right” way to start learning how to draw
[Book] Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. Chapters: Introduction.
Activities
Drawing a bunch of lines and ellipses from the shoulder
Do whatever I want!
Work on some hand lettering worksheets I made in Canva
What I Learned
I took detailed notes in my commonplace book and may put them into a Notion page, but here are the highlights:
Sometimes I can get a library book on hold in two days, and sometimes I have to wait three weeks.
Every “how to draw” book and class considers different things “fundamentals” – and even the ones that agree on what they are, teach them in a different order.
It’s easy to fall into a YouTube rabbit hole for hours. Create as much as you consume.
Training your muscles to draw from the shoulder and elbow instead of the wrist is hard!
Deliberate practice means spending time on the things just outside of your comfort zone; mastering the things that are difficult is where you’ll improve the most.
Fail more to learn more. Fail faster to learn faster.
(Steal Like an Artist) Imitation is copying. Emulation is transforming. Nobody is born with a style. Learn and develop your work by reverse engineering other works.
(Art & Fear) The work you make is always one step removed from what you imagined. All art pieces, especially failures, are essential – most of the work you make will be subpar, but it teaches you how to make great work. Learning from work = learning to work.
(Art & Fear) Take time away from finished work to let it settle into you understanding it better later.
(Art & Fear) Have art block? Go back to what was successful or familiar or satisfying, and follow the same routine to recreate the headspace you were in when you could work.
(Proko) 80/20 rule: Spend 20% of time and information on 80% of what you need to improve.
(Drawabox) 50% rule: Spend 50% of your time studying and practicing, and 50% of your time drawing for drawing’s sake.
(Drawabox) Spatial Reasoning is seeing things and knowing how they really exist in a 3D space so you can learn how to flatten them in art.
(Drawabox) Draw with a pen. Drawing with a pen makes you think about your line placement before you actually mark the page. Drawing with pencil allows you to merge thinking and doing into one action.
(Reddit) Observation is about forgetting iconography and image shortcuts and really breaking down what you see into its basic elements like shapes, colors, silhouettes, outlines, etc..
I still want to catch up on the things I skipped over from my plan. Will I get to them in February? Let’s find out...
Most people make new year’s resolutions, but I’m never organized enough to have a plan for the year on January 1st. We're a month into the new year and I have a vision board (above) in my bullet journal, but most of the rest of the pages aren't even set up yet.
My birthday is at the end of January, so I decided to set my new year’s resolutions to start on my birthday. (Posted a few days late, whoops.)
These are my intentions for my 37th year:
1. Create Art Every Day
Most people have a fairly prescriptive view of what counts as “art.” Pencils and paper, paint brushes and canvases. I want to find the art in anything I make. I want to create something every day this year. To me, creating can be any number of things:
Drawing
Coloring
Painting
Calligraphy
Knitting
Crocheting
Writing
Journaling
Scrapbooking
Art, to me, is something I can point to when I’m done and say, “See? Look what I made.”
2. Learn New Things
I never had a formal art education.
My parents were self-taught artists who pushed me to teach myself, but I was a kid without any guidance and with limited tools. No art classes, no books, no internet. I just drew for fun, without any structure or foundation of knowledge.
So it’s time to get studying. I’ve spent hours mining Reddit threads and YouTube channels for resources and content to get started, and so far I have a concept of a plan – at least for the next few months.
3. Take Time
One of my personal goals is to be more intentional about the things I do, and I want to extend that to art: I want to take the time to really appreciate what I’m making and the process it takes to create something. I’m impatient, so this is probably going to be a struggle.
4. Seek Progress, Not Perfection
I tend to abandon projects halfway through, out of boredom or frustration. I can see the end goal from the beginning, but I reach a point where I get frustrated and can’t see how to pull myself out of the messy middle to actually get to that finish line. As a perfectionist, it’s going to be hard to accept that I can’t be good at everything on the first try, and I have to look past the imperfections so I can get to the good part (the end).
Maybe having more eyes on the messy middle will give me the accountability I need to push past the frustration and follow through on the things I plan.
5. Share My Progress
I know from years of procrastination and working-through-chaos that the best way to follow through on my intentions is to have someone else there to hold me accountable. I’m still figuring out my studying and creating pace, so I haven’t decided on how frequently I’ll post – maybe every day, maybe specific days, maybe every week – but I do want to make a point of sharing each step of my journey, even when it's ugly and messy and I hate it.
And even if only one other person ever sees it, that’s still one more person than me by myself.
Hi to all the other starting artists out there. I’m Logan.
I grew up in an artistic household but I lost my passion for art in high school. 20 years later, I’m a corporate trainer and technical writer, and I want to make beautiful things again.
I’m not a first-time-touching-a-pencil beginner. I was really into drawing mermaids and sharks as a kid. Maybe it’s just nostalgia clouding my memory, but I think I was pretty good for a pre-teen. I didn’t really work with a lot of mediums or styles, and I’ve lost my drawing muscle memory over the years. So I’m restarting: learning the fundamentals, practicing a lot more, experimenting, and hopefully leveling up to be better than I was in middle school.
Everything I did as a kid has been lost to time, so here is my 2025 starting point. I'm not in love with it, but it's a start. A restart.
This is me restarting my art journey. Follow along if you want to see where things go from here.
