The New Line and Color Academy
Comics | Concept Art | Illustration
60-day guarantee • Lifetime access • Pay once
Big News
The Academy Has Been Rebuilt and There Is a $50 Bonus Course This Week
The Line and Color Academy is my complete course for drawing and illustrating in the line and color style. The same style I use for my comics, my concept art, and my illustrations.
This year I rebuilt it.
- Upgraded lessons. Expanded descriptions, screenshots, and searchable technical detail across all 197 lessons.
- The Grand Atelier. A new community space. A weekly art thread, a monthly livestream, and the Oracle library of my teaching.
- A $50 bonus course. Join in the next week and Drawing Scenes in Line and Color comes with it. Three major tutorials, nine lessons.
One payment of $290 USD. Lifetime access, lifetime updates, 60 day money-back guarantee.
The bonus goes away in:
The Academy stays open. Drawing Scenes does not.
The bonus is no longer available
Why We Draw
You Wanted to Draw Those Worlds Yourself
You grew up on comics, cartoons and video games. Somewhere in there you stopped wanting to look at them and started wanting to make them.
Characters, creatures, your own stories, out of your own head.
For me it was Tintin and Asterix, JRPGs and the art in their instruction manuals, manga, and fantasy illustration. I wanted to draw those worlds so badly.
That is where I started
It took me years to get past that, and years more to get any professional polish. But I learned it, and it made me a concept artist. I have been a professional working artist for over twenty years now, drawing comics, concept art for games, and illustration.
Along the way I noticed something about how artists actually get good.
The Missing Piece
There Are Two Foundations Underneath the One Everybody Talks About
Show a good artist your folio and you will hear the same advice. Your drawing needs work, study the foundation. Perspective, anatomy, rendering, composition.
That advice is true. It is just the third layer.
The first is the foundation of doing
Drawing is a physical skill. It has more in common with dancing or martial arts than with maths. You get better at making art by making art, and before anything else works you need the habit of turning up.
The second is the foundation of process
A reliable way of taking an idea from your head to a finished image. If you do not know how to start a picture and finish it, every image is a gamble. That is why so many get abandoned halfway.
Then comes the technical foundation
Perspective, anatomy, rendering, colour theory, applied to the art you actually want to make.
I am not waving away the technical work. I taught foundation drawing at a university entertainment design school for ten years, and I took people from can't-draw-in-high-school to a professional folio and a job.
I believe in the foundation. I teach the foundation.
But across hundreds of students and decades of watching people learn, what separated the ones who got really good was never how much they studied.
They all just made a lot of art.
The ones who struggled were usually doing everything right. Endless studies, endless tutorials. None of it moves until you are making work as well.
Which means the thing that will make you better is the thing you got into this for. Drawing should be fun.
The Five Stage System
Most of Us Think We Are at Stage Three
The Academy answers one question. What should you be focusing on right now?
Because most of us are focusing on the wrong thing. The biggest problem I saw in a decade of teaching was people worrying about style, or professional workflow, or which brush pack to buy, while not making any art. You burn energy on things that are not your problem yet.
So I split the journey into five stages.
Stage one. Build an artistic ritual. Get sketching. Pencil and paper. It does not matter what you draw yet, only that drawing is part of your week.
Stage two. Build a simple reliable process. A way of working where you sit down, start, and know you will finish, because you have done it before. Keep it simpler than you think.
Stage three. Track your progress. Not guessing. Looking at your own work over time and knowing for a fact that it is improving.
Stage four. Style and expansion. The things people worry about first belong here. Who you are as an artist, harder images, deeper technical work.
Stage five. The professional level. The last five or ten percent, portfolios, working with art directors.
The key to the five stages is mostly about what you do not do. Every art course adds more to study. This one tells you what to ignore until it matters.
There is no point worrying about your style if you are not drawing regularly.
And the tutorials are there when you are ready for them. Real time, fully narrated, running from a sketch you can finish in an hour up to a cover quality illustration that takes about twenty hours, with a step by step guide for every phase.
The New Community
The Grand Atelier
There was always one thing the five stages could not do alone.
I built the Academy so you could work through it without me. That worked for self-directed learners. But I taught in universities for over a decade, and I know what accountability is worth, and what it does to be alongside other people going through the same thing.
So the Academy now opens into the Grand Atelier, the Drawing Codex community space. It is for one thing. Hang out and make art.
It is art only. No off-topic discussion, no internet drama.
The Art Ritual space is where we post work. A weekly art thread for sketches, works in progress and finished pieces. Low pressure, and everyone there is on the same path. I run a monthly livestream and open Q&A, and I post questions, polls and activities through the month.
The Oracle is my YouTube teaching organised by topic. Composition, sketching, anatomy, thumbnailing, and planning your development as an artist. It plays inside the platform without ads, and every lesson has screenshots, a written description and key takeaways, so you can read one as well as watch it. It also holds guest lessons from the paid courses.
And every lesson in the Academy is getting the same upgrade. Expanded descriptions, screenshots, step by step images. If you forget how I processed a scanned drawing in Photoshop, you can find it again in seconds instead of scrubbing through footage.
The Fun Part
A Year of This and You Have a Stack of Finished Pictures
Turn up. Build the ritual. If you are not making things yet, start with the sketchbook.
Keep that going and in a year you have a stack of finished work. Put one from three months ago next to one from today and you can see the difference without asking anyone.
That is where confidence actually comes from.
Without the first two foundations it is easy to spend years on studies and exercises, getting steadily better at studies and exercises, and never make the thing you got into this for.
You can absolutely do this. It is how artists have always got good, and it is the fun way to get there. Make cool stuff, week after week, and watch yourself improve.
Join Today
Everything You Get
- 197 lessons across seven course spaces
- The five stage system, the simple reliable process, and the step by step guide
- Real time, fully narrated tutorials, from a one hour sketch to a twenty hour cover
- The seven day sketchbook ritual mini course
- All the PSDs and brushes
- The Grand Atelier: the Art Ritual space and the Oracle
- Lifetime access and lifetime updates
Join in the next week and you also get Drawing Scenes in Line and Color, an extra mini course valued at $50. Three major tutorials across nine lessons, each one a complete illustration start to finish.
Drawing Scenes in Line and Color
Three major tutorials across nine lessons. Valued at $50. Yours when you join this week.
Lion Riders is from the original Drawing for Comics course I taught at CG Society in 2012, with a painted background behind the line work.
A Scent of Betrayal is the image I use to advertise the Drawing Codex, the one in all the YouTube intros. You get it twice. The complete real time recording, silent, exactly as it happened, and a sped up version where I narrate what I am doing and why.
The Entrance (The Gate) I made specially for this course. Thumbnailing, a tonal plan, and a darker, heavier line that leans back toward my early comic book work.
The Academy stays open after this week. Drawing Scenes does not.
One payment of $290 USD. Lifetime access, lifetime updates, and a 60 day money-back guarantee.
Lifetime updates is not hypothetical. If you bought the Line and Color Academy years ago, get in touch and I will get you set up on the new platform with all of this included.
Join the Line and Color Academy
One payment and the bonus if you join this week
Line and Color Academy
The complete Academy, the Drawing Scenes bonus, and access to the Grand Atelier.
What's included
- 197 lessons across seven course spaces
- The five stage system for knowing what to work on next
- The simple reliable process, start to finish
- Real time fully narrated tutorials and the step by step guide
- The seven day sketchbook ritual mini course
- Bonus: Drawing Scenes in Line and Color, three tutorials
- The Art Ritual space and the Oracle
- All the PSDs and brushes
- Lifetime access and lifetime updates
- 60-day money-back guarantee
Pay once, lifetime access
$290 USD
Join the Academy60-day money-back guarantee. The bonus is included for the next week.
60-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Work through the course. If it is not for you, send me an email and I will give you your money back.
No questions asked.
Let's Get Started!
Join now and you get instant access. You can start the first lessons today. I cannot wait to see the art that you make.