Course Review: Kurt Michael Russell's Beginner Procreate Course on Udemy
Hello all!
Welcome to my first review.
TLDR: This is a great course that demonstrates a comic book style of coloring and shows KMR's workflow in Procreate. It was extremely helpful in learning Procreate's features and how digital painting can be approached. One cavet I'll put in here is that if you don't have great drawing fundamentals (like me), it can be frustrating to have good color on a crappy character!
Full Udemy Course Name: The Beginner's Guide to Digital Art with Procreate on iPad!
Udemy Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/procreate-guide/
On sale price: $12.99 ($44.99 normally)
Instructor: Kurt Michael Russell (KMR)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kmichaelrussell/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCps08eOJfFRm00TE5LStIIg
Website: https://www.comiccolor.com/
Longer Review
After first buying the Procreate app, I went searching for a series of guides on how to use it (I'll have a separate blog on my current recommendations for picking it up) and having used Udemy for some other courses, I searched "Beginner Procreate" and this course popped up. I did some additional research and looked at the reviews and felt that I could approach this class (plus the mech-armed guy he is illustrating in the photo looked pretty cool!).
Note: My skill level approaching this course was close to 0. I had no previous digital painting or digital art experience.
As far as Udemy courses go, this one didn't have a ton of videos (about ~3.5 hours) however it is a really straight forward approach to taking a drawing from sketch to a finished, colored illustration. Like most Udemy courses, Kurt starts with a "how to use Udemy", including the resource files he created for course students, the Q&A section, etc... If you've ever taken a Udemy course, these are all very similar (regardless of topic). One item I'll note here is one of the custom brushes that is included is Kurt's "Flatter" brush, which is extremely awesome and very important for following along through the course material. I'll cover more on why later.
The course introduction starts with Kurt explaining how to import his custom files and brushes into Procreate, along with explaining and demonstrating the different tools that are available to digital artists within Procreate (layers, smudging, brushes, and gestures). For someone like myself that had no idea how to use Procreate, this section was extremely helpful. The majority of the videos are under 10 minutes in this section, so if you ever forget how to use a tool/feature or need a refresher, it won't take too much time.
In the next section, Kurt now demonstrates how to start a drawing and walking through his creative process. Students start with thumbnails, dividing up the screen into 4 quadrants and then creating a super quick sketch (of a character) in each one. After all 4 are done, pick your favorite, and using the power of Procreate make that quadrant full screen! From here, Kurt demonstrates how to fade a layer (decrease opacity), do one more pencil pass that gets into a bit more details before creating an inking layer for your drawing. At this point in the course, I had an "inked" drawing and was ready to head into the next section: Color!
The color section of the course is where Kurt's expertise really shows. I never knew how comics were inked, and part of the fun of this course is Kurt shares his work experience and stories as he demonstrates different techniques. Remember that "Flatter" custom brush I mentioned earlier? This is where it comes in super handy! Kurt walks through a multipart of adding flat colors as a base for our illustration, then moves on to light and shadows and how to polish the drawing. Kurt uses a lot of the awesome Procreate specific features to accomplish this really easily and it helps reinforce the earlier section of the course. At the end of this section, Kurt showcases adding the small details that really make an illustration come to life such as changing the color of your lines, and adding special effects!
At this point, the course is pretty much over, with your completed drawing (ideally) looking like a comic book character! Overall I really enjoyed going through this course and learned a ton. I don't have much of a foundation for color or drawing, so while I learned a ton I do think I'll go through the course again after reinforcing my fundamentals.
I found Kurt easy to listen to and enjoyed his stories. None of the videos in the course go over 13 minutes each, so it is easy to progress through the course in small chunks of time. I would absolutely recommend this to folks that are new to Procreate and like the coloring style of Kurt's illustrations!
Welcome to my first review.
TLDR: This is a great course that demonstrates a comic book style of coloring and shows KMR's workflow in Procreate. It was extremely helpful in learning Procreate's features and how digital painting can be approached. One cavet I'll put in here is that if you don't have great drawing fundamentals (like me), it can be frustrating to have good color on a crappy character!
Full Udemy Course Name: The Beginner's Guide to Digital Art with Procreate on iPad!
Udemy Link: https://www.udemy.com/course/procreate-guide/
On sale price: $12.99 ($44.99 normally)
Instructor: Kurt Michael Russell (KMR)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kmichaelrussell/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCps08eOJfFRm00TE5LStIIg
Website: https://www.comiccolor.com/
Longer Review
After first buying the Procreate app, I went searching for a series of guides on how to use it (I'll have a separate blog on my current recommendations for picking it up) and having used Udemy for some other courses, I searched "Beginner Procreate" and this course popped up. I did some additional research and looked at the reviews and felt that I could approach this class (plus the mech-armed guy he is illustrating in the photo looked pretty cool!).
Note: My skill level approaching this course was close to 0. I had no previous digital painting or digital art experience.
As far as Udemy courses go, this one didn't have a ton of videos (about ~3.5 hours) however it is a really straight forward approach to taking a drawing from sketch to a finished, colored illustration. Like most Udemy courses, Kurt starts with a "how to use Udemy", including the resource files he created for course students, the Q&A section, etc... If you've ever taken a Udemy course, these are all very similar (regardless of topic). One item I'll note here is one of the custom brushes that is included is Kurt's "Flatter" brush, which is extremely awesome and very important for following along through the course material. I'll cover more on why later.
The course introduction starts with Kurt explaining how to import his custom files and brushes into Procreate, along with explaining and demonstrating the different tools that are available to digital artists within Procreate (layers, smudging, brushes, and gestures). For someone like myself that had no idea how to use Procreate, this section was extremely helpful. The majority of the videos are under 10 minutes in this section, so if you ever forget how to use a tool/feature or need a refresher, it won't take too much time.
In the next section, Kurt now demonstrates how to start a drawing and walking through his creative process. Students start with thumbnails, dividing up the screen into 4 quadrants and then creating a super quick sketch (of a character) in each one. After all 4 are done, pick your favorite, and using the power of Procreate make that quadrant full screen! From here, Kurt demonstrates how to fade a layer (decrease opacity), do one more pencil pass that gets into a bit more details before creating an inking layer for your drawing. At this point in the course, I had an "inked" drawing and was ready to head into the next section: Color!
The color section of the course is where Kurt's expertise really shows. I never knew how comics were inked, and part of the fun of this course is Kurt shares his work experience and stories as he demonstrates different techniques. Remember that "Flatter" custom brush I mentioned earlier? This is where it comes in super handy! Kurt walks through a multipart of adding flat colors as a base for our illustration, then moves on to light and shadows and how to polish the drawing. Kurt uses a lot of the awesome Procreate specific features to accomplish this really easily and it helps reinforce the earlier section of the course. At the end of this section, Kurt showcases adding the small details that really make an illustration come to life such as changing the color of your lines, and adding special effects!
At this point, the course is pretty much over, with your completed drawing (ideally) looking like a comic book character! Overall I really enjoyed going through this course and learned a ton. I don't have much of a foundation for color or drawing, so while I learned a ton I do think I'll go through the course again after reinforcing my fundamentals.
I found Kurt easy to listen to and enjoyed his stories. None of the videos in the course go over 13 minutes each, so it is easy to progress through the course in small chunks of time. I would absolutely recommend this to folks that are new to Procreate and like the coloring style of Kurt's illustrations!
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