Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: Adam Clague

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This is the tenth in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

This post is about one of my most recent teachers, as Adam’s course was only released in October 2019 (in fact the second part of the course is not yet available). I had followed Adam on Instagram for a while and I love the feeling of his paintings with their combination of realism and loose brushwork, so I was excited when his online portrait painting course was finally released.

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Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: Richard Robinson

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This is the ninth in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

I can’t exactly remember why, but around the end of 2013, having always been obsessed with portraits and figures, I suddenly started taking an interest in landscape painting. The trouble was I had never done it before, so it was very much a trial and error process until I came across a website called Live Painting Lessons (now My Painting Club), which offered access to a lot of landscape painting demonstration videos by New Zealand artist Richard Robinson.

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Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: Chris Legaspi

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This is the eighth in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

Around the same time I started studying figure drawing with Proko, I also came across Chris Legaspi. I don’t remember where I first found him, but I loved the style of his drawings, and wanted to learn more about his approach. Fortunately, he already had some online lessons available.

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Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: Jason Seiler

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This is the seventh in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

For this post, we’re going all the way back to 2007, when I took my first ever online art course. I had been interested in caricature since I was a teenager, but had only had a handful of pretty mediocre books to learn from, so I never really improved much, and I felt like I really needed some expert instruction. So when I heard that one of my main caricature inspirations, Jason Seiler, was releasing an online course via Schoolism, I jumped at the chance!

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Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: Sean Cheetham

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This is the sixth in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

Sean Cheetham has the dubious honour of being the only teacher in this series (so far) who I’ve actually met and studied from in real life.

I think I might have first heard of Sean when he was a guest artist in Jason Seiler’s The Complete Artist book, back in 2013. I started following him on Instagram, and every time he posted one of his demo portraits I thought I really need to learn how he does that. But I was always disappointed to find he didn’t have any online demos available, and his method remained a mystery to me for several years.

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Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: Stan Prokopenko

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This is the fifth in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

In early 2017 I decided I needed to get better at drawing. I was always ok at it, but I never practiced that much, and when I did go to the occasional figure drawing session, I would always leave slightly disappointed with what I had produced.

One day I was browsing some artist forums looking for recommendations, and I saw several people raving about these YouTube tutorials from ‘Proko’. I checked out one of the videos, on How to Draw the Head from Any Angle, and at first I thought the video was kind of cheesy, with the animation and comedy elements, but the content seemed promising, and piqued my interest. After a few more videos I was hooked, and even started to enjoy the cheesy elements, like Skelly, the animated skeleton. So I proceeded to make my way through all the free content on the site (there’s a lot!)

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Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist: David Jamieson

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This is the fourth in a series of portraits called Teachers of a Self-Guided Artist. Check out the intro post The Self-Taught Myth to read more about it.

At the end of 2015, I had been painting mainly landscapes for a couple of years, and I wanted to get back into portraiture, but I felt really out of practice and wanted to refresh my skills.

I happened to come into contact with David Jamieson through my day job, and found that he was teaching an online course in portrait drawing that sounded like just what I needed!

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