Observational Drawing: Illustrate with a Fresh Perspective (online art course)

Celeste Byers (Instagram | website) is a freelance illustrator and artist who specializes in creating large-scale murals.

In addition to the murals, she also creates beautiful detailed illustrations. This online course shows you how she creates one using observation techniques, from sketch, to inks, and to colours. This is a course for those who want to learn about drawing with ink and then colouring your art digitally.

This course is suitable for beginners. To follow along you'll just need fineliners/multiliners and paper.

The course starts off with simple drawing exercises to get you familiar with drawing from observation.

The final project will be based on this reference created using collage.

It's a step-by-step course with instructions are clear and insightful. Celeste goes into how you can make an illustration look good by using composition, design and creativity. Every technique is explained with the how and the why, so you can learn by copying and also understand the techniques.

The one thing that's missing from the course is how she actually digitises her art. The completed illustration is drawn on this huge piece of paper. She says she uses a scanner. My guess is she uses an A3 scanner because using an A4 scanner will involve a lot of effort in stitching the numerous scans together. Or maybe she just used a camera.

So after importing the illustration into Photoshop, she goes through the whole process of colouring.

This is an insightful course filled with tips and techniques. It's easy to follow along and the exercises are very manageable and achievable. It's a good course that's worth the money.

5 out of 5 stars.

Oh, check out my own drawing courses too!

Check out this course by Celeste Byers and reviews on Domestika.

Price of this course is usually around US $19, but the price will vary depending on whether there are any promotion.

Disclosure: This course was provided free to me for this review. When you buy any course through the Domestika affiliate links, I earn some commission at not extra cost to you