In February this year I signed up to take Sterling Hundley’s IDEATION LAB online course.
As the name implies it is not a course about the technicalities of drawing or painting, but instead focuses on ideation – the generation and execution of ideas. It is a pretty intensive ten week course that has you drawing tons of preparatory work and eventually finishing off with a final value study drawing or painting. Explorations of different mediums are highly encouraged and if you’re willing to push yourself and experiment you might end up pleasantly surprised.
The best thing for me about the course was not needing to come up with ideas but learning to slow down and really dig into the meat and bones of what I wanted to explore. Instead of just running with the first image that came to mind I really dove into thumb-nailing and testing out different artistic scenarios before rushing ahead and going straight into my final drawing.
If I had to nitpick something about the course I would say that I would have enjoyed a little more interaction with Sterling on the course’s Facebook page. That said, I do understand that he wants to reach as many students as possible and $125 for a ten week course is next to nothing for his time, so it’s a very small nitpick.
Though it is my first paid online course like this so I don’t really have anything to compare it to, I will happily go ahead and recommend this to artists of any level. If nothing else it is going to give you a fast-paced, deadline-packed ten weeks that will help to push yourself and your art.
Here are a few bits and pieces that I produced over the course. Enjoy.
