Create Epic Depth In Your Scenes!

[@MrPondDuck]

My guy had a coffee this morning! Love the passion, and great video man, as always

[@smiley_worth]

While I understand that it's a popular format nowadays, I personally find your usual style to be incredibly meditative and calming. Watching your videos helps me to unwind and feel more at ease, or even encourages me to slow down and truly listen. Your content has been a source of comfort for me, and I truly appreciate the effort you put into creating it.

[@smiley_worth]

Love the vid thank you for this!!

[@jbkhan1135]

Agree! I love the longer format videos!

[@tekaneo]

Absolutely agree!!! The “classic” format is pure treasure. Of course this video has also great information. However, the rapid nature of it makes it super difficult to absorb the knowledge.

[@nataliasouza6444]

The shorter format was very useful, as always your content is very helpful. But I really like the longer videos, it's very peaceful and I personally enjoy watching it while I'm drawing.

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Good to know! Thanks!!

[@UlfricStromcloak]

You know Tim what have attracted me towards your artwork & your art style 1. I love Bande Dessine. And no wonder for someone who has worked in this section for a long while will always attract me. 2. This style reminds me of Alphonse Mucha, now I am not really into fine arts or that sort of Design, but I just don't know why I feel so pleased watching his art. 3. I think this is the most simplistic yet comprehensive style an artist can have, whose main target is storytelling. This is fleshed out yet simple style that is so robust that you can simply use it for Concept design to production art to Visual development to Illustration to comic without any tweaking. 4. Last, but not least, the importance of linework. I think it gives a solid structure to your artwork. I always appreciate the emphasis on line art. As an aspiring concept artist/draftsmanship I really like it when a teacher is putting so much importance in drawing. I am really considering getting your Line & Color Academy & Drawing Scene course in the near future. Hopefully soon.

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Hey! Thanks for the kind words here! It's great to hear you appreciate this type of style! I look forward to having you onboard the Line and Color Academy soon!

[@NiRudraws]

The whole thing of separating the background, middle ground and foreground line art and painting is amazing! You keep on blowing my mind and your art style keeps on delivering on the good stuff

[@jbkhan1135]

Your videos are always the best. Your instruction has been immensely helpful in my art journey. Thank you again for sharing your knowledge with us!

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Thanks so much 😊

[@Buddhabellie]

I like the shorter format, except I like the laid-back tim more....but learned a lot. Thanks

[@mikoybnz]

I really enjoy your videos my man! Thank you for contributing so much to the art community

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Glad you like them!

[@sergiogonzart]

Thanks, this helps in my current project!

[@MegaPieru3000]

Yes 👍🏻✨

[@jbkhan1135]

I would love to see you do a course on Proko's website!

[@Thezellofamily]

Thank you for breaking this down into easy to digest pieces. BTW, you Sound a bit congested compared to normal. Hope you're feeling OK.:)

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Haha! Yes too many meetings and recordings this week!

[@nimroddormin9844]

Great video as always! I tend to give those viewers credit who point out that you seem to be a little excited, which isn't necessary, because you're a cool guy with a clear message. Just my opinion, sorry. But thanks a lot for talking about atmosphere here! Related to that: I finally seem to have mastered digital painting - which tempts me to paint in the backgrounds rather than simply cel shade my lineart like I do for the characters. It gets quick results that look nice, but it creates the problem of figures floating on a "green screen" - the people and their world are no coherent unit anymore... Paradoxically, painting the figures in the same manner as the backgrounds would make the process much slower than cel shading them... Could you make a video on merging the actors with their backdrops in a convincing way? Or about ways to unify lines and painterly colours, if you will. I really struggle with that!

[@Slotzzzz]

Hi Codex.. rather have the longer format,I want to pick your brain 🧠,ha..hay,been wanting to say your minimalist rendering is great, kind of Morpheus style,adding to what you're talking about..also the concept of color Harmony is a good point, (color Harmony can make bad art look good) same with a good inker/rendering over someone else's work.. I also heard someone say(there is no bad color) hope your book is going well.i go now, bye'eeee..

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Thanks! Always great to hear your thoughts! Yeah doing some more videos on color is a great idea.

[@tiamatandall]

Wow! That was something! Well, while I understand that you have to try new formats and look at the raw data of numbers and view count, I somewhat remember you being sort of against the speedpainting culture of the internet that makes young artists thing they need to be a red speedster superhero to make it in the art world. You would demonstrate what the speed a professional artist draws in really is. Maybe there is something to be said in those same lines for the videos where you present information instead of a drawing focusesd demonstration. Being a teacher myself I know that if I just dump everything that I know on my students at once, they won't understand much. I'd actually need to make them understand in their own time each step of the process in order for them to really learn. That strategy could even prove to be more profitable once people might need to watch the same video more than once to digest the information presented on it, but I fear it would take away from the long term engagement of your channel since people might feel fatigued by the format and not come back for more videos after a while. There is always also the side of who do you want you public persona to be perceived as. You seamed pretty true to yourself on the more laid back videos from the channel's beginning. If that trully who you are, I'm sure you past viewers will stay with you, but if that is too far from your real self I think it may be difficult to keep the act up. I always enjoy your content and I really think you deserve both the financial compensation for all the awesome content you've been putting out for us, as well as the public appreciation you are due. If that is the way you get it, I'm all of it. I just remenber a quote from Immanuel Kant - the philospher - in wich he says that some books would be shorter if they werent so short. Meaning that if things were explained a bit longer, maybe with more examples or with more depth, maybe they wouldn't need som much interpretation and effort from the audience. If you are trully bothered by comments that say you speak too slow - wich I've never seen BTW - maybe recording the video in your confortable speed, edit it as you would normally and than speed it up by a notch in post production, like 1.1x or 1.2x, could be enough. I've heard it's a trick many youtubers use nowadays and I imagine it would require less effort on your part.

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Hey Tim! Thanks so much for this feedback!! Yeah I totally agree with your points here. I feel the same way after trying this type of shorter video. A lot of experimentation with different formats is to just see what happens. Personally one of the things I am always trying to teach is that we need to put work out into the world to properly assess it. Me thinking about 'can I say this in less time' is different to actually doing it and seeing what the results are once it is published. Less idea space and more reality :) I think something that is true... is that I tend to ramble on. And I think I could get better at being concise even in the longer videos. So some of my experimentation with shorter stuff is to test that style of internal thought. None of anything I do is scripted, so much of what I am developing is both an internal dialogue for explaining things, and an internal pace for speaking. If I go back to watch my older tutorials (say from 2012 or 14) they are really really really low energy :) So getting the balance right is something I am always working on. Same with avoiding saying Again... and all of those other bridging words. I have never heard that quote from Kant... But it makes perfect sense. I agree 1000%. I think there are a lot of comments that say they either speed my videos up by 2x (lol). Or that they want them to be shorter. This may seem strange... but my desire to try this is less about pandering to the views or algorithm and more a matter of the challenge... my initial reaction is very much along the lines of what you have written here... that slower is better, and people who want shorter videos are probably less serious about learning to draw... but then there is the voice which says... maybe that's just me post rationalising my own natural way of doing things. Often I find that lowering resistance to new ideas like this can bring about interesting results. But... I think my strengths are in long form :) And I'm thinking a better option would be to stay with a slower pace and work on narrowing down the subject matter to one simple tip... that way it can be explained properly in a short video. I have a long term plan for this channel and my online teaching in general... Most of what I want to do is exactly along the lines of the Immanuel Kant quote. If I do shorter form it will be in addition to the longer laid back lessons. I actually recorded two versions of this video... the other one was 38 minutes long... this one was 12minutes. I was playing around with the idea of posting both... but ended up just doing this one :) Maybe I'll put the other one up sometime. Sometime soon I am going to start a podcast format show (on a separate channel... as the youtube algorithm prefers that) that is more laid back and talks about the productivity/ritual/freelance/etc side of being an artist and an aspiring artist. So lots of new stuff in the works, in addition to the longer format tutorials. Anyway just thinking out loud! Thanks again for your thoughts. It's awesome that you are thinking about this and letting me know. It helps me think through these ideas!

[@tiamatandall]

@@TheDrawingCodex Hey Tim! First of all I do agree that most times we just have to try things out and wage the results. Especially in creative business where the constraints aren't that obvious or regulated as they are in more formal areas. I don't think that the videos being shorter in itself would be a problem. You might even edit parts of you longer videos for youtube shorts if that is something that you think might be useful. There is a pretty famous youtube channel that teaches Digital Painting focused on Prop Concept Art - Ctrl+Paint - for which the average video length is around 5 to 6 munites and it is still pretty instructive and successful. The thing is that the videos are concise and to the point. They build the concepts one onto the other so the autor knows he doesn't need to touch on other topics outside of the single one that is the center of that particular video. Having a big picture and a clear road map from zero to the final word you want to say about drawing with your channel is kind of required if you are aiming for that. Being a university graduated teacher, I hope you don't think I'm just making things up - not in an English speaking country, though. One of the qualities I really think is important for a teaching endeavor is that of tempo. This is music theory word that refers to the "speed" of a particular song. It's one of the most useful ways a song can bring up a ceratain felling in the audience. Trying to think about what song you would ideally hope that particular video of yours would allude to - would bring the same felling as the one you get when listening to that song - and trying to match your tempo to that of that song is a great way to start being more conscious about the feeling you are building around your public communication persona. Do you want to sound like a Trap musician? A fantasy inspired Heavy Metal band? A folk song? I for one feel the same way as listening to a generic pop song when watching a generic minecraft youtuber. In person teaching also has the perpetual problem of having to fit different subjects of different complexity levels in the same time span. While this is a horrible problem in the day to day, it has the side effect of forcing some kind of urgency into the way the teacher communicates. That in itself causes the student to focus a little more. So another technique you might try is to have a arbitrary video lengh you imagine a particular topic would take you to explain and trying to hit that the best you can. Finally, the last idea that comes to me at the moment is that one of the common teaching techniches to favour the student understanding of any particular topic is "the sandwich". You start the explanation with a overview of the topic contextualizing why that might be useful for the student's particular goals. After that you dive into the in depth imformation dump organazing the subtopics the best you can, trying to have the first one being the most simple and the basis for what comes after and so on. At the end you do a review of the topic in broader terms, focussing again on how that what was studied might be useful to the sudent's personal journey. So for video editing you might start the introduction showing the result of your demo as you used to do for your digital "Watch me Draw/Sketch" videos. I would change nothing about the demoing part of the videos outside of maybe planning a bit more ahead what you will talk about - trying to break any subject down into the largest number of topics usually helps organizing our line of thinking and finding a streamlined way of explaining things. Maybe for the review part of things you could separate that into a shorter video in which you would kind of "prove" the concepts you had presented in the past video is really useful with examples of them being put into practice on your own body of work and maybe even other artists' images. That might even be an oportunity to bring back the start of your "Art Ritual" videos surfing artstaion. I hope this letter finds you well. LOL Anyways, I hope that something I've said might be useful. I'm just trying to help you a tiny portion of what you have helped so many artists. Myself included.

[@ridsy1643]

Helloooo

[@GoshemGarble]

To add to other comments here, I'm not sure its the shortness of the video, but more how you are talking that's a bit off-putting. It's faster, and also louder in a way that's trying to be dynamic and attention grabbing, but (I'm not quite sure how to describe it but ill make an attempt) comes across in a way where you are trying to grab, take hold, and keep someone's attention instead of their attention being absorbed into what you are saying. Like, I'm no longer watching because I'm absorbed by the content, the grabbing is taking part of attention so it feels like my attention would naturally go somewhere else if you weren't doing these things; I'm partly focused on the grabbing and not the content. Also, most of the onscreen movement is happening in your camera in the bottom right, so my attention keeps going to your image, not the image you are describing. The more relaxed tone of your videos is one of the reasons I watch. If you did the same lines in your more relaxed tone, sure a few minutes would be added, but the better delivery would make the aspects of the image come across more, and the assertions of what I will be taught at the start of the video would come across less as hype and more as true statements. Like, it's not as confident and doesn't have the same feel of expertise.

[@TheDrawingCodex]

Great points!! Thanks for your feedback! I appreciate you taking the time to let me know how this comes across