Overview

I like tutorials. You can always learn something from them even if you don’t care for the subject or the technique. Especially with technology’s onward march, its important to keep up to date with what’s going on. Not just what other people are doing, but how they are doing it. Unless you have a lot of time to experiment, or your job provides regular training opportunities, tutorials are really the fastest and easiest way to expand your working knowledge.

One thing about tutorials, they can look very intimidating. The end results are often spectacular. Maybe more than you think you can accomplish on your own. The best ones usually are–how smart and talented you are for even finishing!

My Opinions

You can see over in the tutorial gallery what I started with, a few saved steps along the way and my finish. Here are some things I’ve considered carefully before passing judgment:

• Could I finish the tutorial in the time it said it would take?
• Could I achieve their finished art?
• Did they skip any pertinent steps in explaining the technique?
• Were the directions clear and specific, including tools and settings?
• Was there an actual technique involved or was it an exercise in rendering?
• Who was this tutorial written for, what level of mastery?

These are things I’d be critical of in a real art class. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you can teach it. Its also true with tutorials.

Tutorials In General

Of the tutorials I’ve worked on so far, I have one very big criticism. These works, especially the highly realistic portraits, are certainly based off of photo reference, which they do not supply.

I have mixed feelings about this. The last kind of tutorial I am interested in is the kind where you paint over top of a photograph. To do these tutorials, you have to use the finished painting as your reference—which is almost as good as a photograph. Because to make the painting, the tutorial artist had one, of this I am sure–the detail is too precise to fake.

Would the photograph help in execution of the painting? I have mixed feelings about that too. It would be nice to see what changes they made along the way in their paintings. Would it make it easier somehow? No, probably not, but at least it would keep the less experienced painter from despair–thinking that someone could draw and paint at that level without reference.