facial features from mmmmonexx’s 100 portraits challenge on class101.

class101 legit raised me as an artist. when i was starting out i was convinced the reason i couldn’t draw, and couldn’t sit still through a fundamentals class, was that american art classes were too lame. so obviously the solution was to start taking korean and spanish ones instead. domestika, i’m looking at you. i think that’s part of why i go down tutorial holes and half the time genuinely hate drawing: there’s always a million more things you could be doing to improve the work.

that said, class101 has a lot of really fun classes, all kinds of tips and tricks and rendering styles, which is probably why you’ll catch me drawing in five different styles. i love rendering, i’ve been working through alla prima for almost a year now. but if i can’t finish a piece in an hour the frustration outweighs any joy i’d get from finishing it. like one or two years ago i was all in on gouache and taking all of these courses from justin donaldson then mysteriously caught covid halfway through the courses and dropped off the face of the earth, and happily never opened a gouache tube since.

i’ve taken a lot of anatomy classes. new masters academy, tom fox, a few from chommang. mmmmonexx is the one whose methodology actually goes step by step and stays reproducible even as you turn the body and the features. i support them on patreon, and i think all those little tricks they share do percolate. getting good enough that the whole figure looks right is always a shitty road to go down though, haha.

plus their style is so unsettling, which i love. it reminds me of junji ito.