Review: Sketchbook Skool - Stretching

Submitted by Teoh Yi Chie on

Here's a follow up to the review I wrote for Sketchbook Skool - Beginning. I enrolled for both of the courses at the same time and finally completed the Stretching course.

Stretching is one of many series of video courses offered by the Sketchbook Skool platform. This is priced at USD $99, and those in Europe have to factor in the VAT.

For this course the instructors are follows:

Each instructor covers a specific theme. And for this course, the theme is about creativity. Most of the lessons involve some form of outdoor or observational sketching except for Jonathan Twingley's lesson.


Jonathan Twingley's lesson quite interesting and talks about style. He shows us the many art materials he uses to create his own style. He makes many drawings with different styles using different materials. Encourage students to experiment.


Lapin's lesson is on lines. You'll watch him draw a portrait, a truck and a group of animated friends during dinner.

France Belleville Van Stone's lesson is on cross hatching and drawing on the iPad. I follow her blog regularly and is always delighted to see her bold comic style sketches. She has a book called Sketch!: The Non-Artist's Guide to Inspiration, Technique, and Drawing Daily Life that you should definitely check out if you to sketch.

Fabio Consoli's lesson is a mix of urban sketching and graphic design. He would be sketching outdoors, taking photos, and then use photos as reference for his collage sketches.


Miguel Herranz talks about the sketchbook, urban sketching and demonstrates location sketching. His demo instructions are a bit sparse. He recommends focusing on a subject and draw outwards from that subject and forget about the composition and "something would happen". For most people I think, that something's probably going to be running out of space. He talks about his inspiration, artists he follows, what sketchbooks should be used for.

Jason Das lesson introduces the Urban Sketchers and his lesson is on sketching outdoors.

You'll also get to peek into the selected sketchbooks of all the instructors. I highly recommend that you check out the blogs for even more wonderful artworks.

Misc

Since this course is part of Sketchbook Skool, I'll also have to mention that they have a forum for the students to interact.

While you may also ask questions on the video pages, you may not get a reply from the instructor because this is not that type of teacher-student school. As such, most of the response will come from other students. For this particular course, I guess it's alright because it deals more with creativity rather than techniques. But that's something you have to take note of.

Conclusion

The videos are meant to be inspiring, and are designed to help you explore more drawing styles, to encourage to do things you've not done before.

You're probably not going to draw like the instructors because you really need to know the basics of drawing first. And you won't learn the fundamentals of drawing from their Beginner course also because it's also a course that's meant to be inspirational rather than fully instructional.

This course is more for watching how the instructors and artists work. There are some tips and techniques shared occasionally. Mostly, it's entertaining to watch but when it comes to actual technical aspect or instructions, I feel that they could have included more. For someone who wants to learn more on drawing techniques, this course is going to leave you wanting more.

So whether this course is worth the money will depend on what you expect from the course.

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