Justyna Dorsz

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Design ideas tutorial

Today I watched Michael Essek’s talk “How to come up with ideas that buyers love”.

There are two things that surprised me:

  • Michael has a much more professional attitude towards making designs. I sort of always just draw what I like. Michael, of course, likes to draw. But he also runs a business. I think I should learn from him.
  • I thought I had a lot of designs. I have now about 240 designs but not all of them are completely unique. Some are just different versions of the save design. Michael has over 2000 designs! He said that maybe even up to 5000 if you include all variants. That’s insane! When did he draw all that?

The talk was very informative and motivating. Go watch it.

ArtStation courses are now free

Courses on ArtStation used to be paid, but now, till the end of the year, they are free.

A lot of the courses are related to 3D modeling, which is not that interesting to me. But there are over 60 courses in the 2D section and I’ve been checking them out.

I’ve already watched “Character Illustration in Procreate” — it’s a short tutorial on painting a cozy scene, the colors are lovely:

And now I am watching “Illuminating a 2D Illustration in Procreate”:

Speaking of free resources, check out Sinix Design on YouTube. There are hundreds of videos teaching how to sketch, how to paint, explaining colors, values, anatomy, etc. My favorite videos are paintovers — he takes someone else’s drawing and improves it. Can’t recommend this channel enough.

Landing Page Hot Tips

I mentioned before that I manage a few websites including the one you are currently on, which is my personal blog, and manichyena.com, which is about games that my brother and I create together.

I don’t know much about web development and I don’t plan to do it professionally. But I want to know enough to be able to create good-looking simple websites when I need to. As everyone nowadays, I learn either by googling problems or stumbling on useful content. I don’t even remember how I found out about Landing Page Hot Tips by Rob Hope. It’s a series of 100 concise tips on how to improve a website. They arrive in your inbox every day for 100 days straight. I am at day 94. I think most of them were useful and what I really liked were examples of beautiful websites that were often included with the tips.

I can’t in good conscience recommend subscribing, though. I learned useful things — that’s good. But I’ve found out I don’t like the format. Yes, the tips were easily digestible, written in a few shorts paragraphs. However, receiving an email every day tired me out, and I am looking forward to the last one so that I can finally stop receiving them. I don’t think I will ever again subscribe to a similar course or series of tips. I am trying to limit the number of newsletters, and emails in general, that I receive.

If you don’t mind receiving emails every day, then subscribe here if you want.