Best Online Art Classes for Digital Artists

Online classes are a great way to build your skills as a digital creative. You take them at your own pace, learn with a hands-on project, and learn from other students.

If all you have is an iPad and an Apple Pencil, which classes should you take? As a digital artist, there are a lot of platform options like YouTube, Udemy, and more for you to learn a wide variety of creative skills.

No matter if you’re a pro or a beginner, this list of online classes, both free and paid, will help you improve your skills in lettering, character design, and more.

Best online classes for lettering

Lettering is the art of drawing letterforms. It’s a subcategory of illustration and also happens to be my specialty. When I was first getting started, it helped to try a lot of different styles and techniques.

The courses featured here include lettering artists and illustrators who have been freelancers and business owners for many years. I’ve found value in resources from all of them over the years and believe you’ll enjoy them as well.

Procreate for Beginners by Teela Cunningham of Every-Tuesday

If you’re new to digital lettering, Procreate is a great beginner-friendly program to learn in. This free course by Teela Cunningham features 10 modules and three hours of step-by-step video content. In it, you’ll learn Procreate tools, interface, settings, and more.

Using four different projects, you’ll learn how to use Procreate while creating bold and dynamic lettering pieces. Students will walk away from this course with the confidence to not only use Procreate but also create detailed lettering pieces that they can post to social media or a portfolio.

You’ll also get fun bonuses like a brush pack, texture file, Procreate color palettes, and more. You’ll find even more brushes from Teela featured in Paperlike™’s free Procreate Brushsets.

Teela Cunningham of Every-Tuesday is a graphic designer, lettering artist, and illustrator. Across her platforms, Teela shares her fun and beautiful project tutorials every Tuesday with her audience of 100,000+ learners from all around the world.

Brush Lettering for Beginners by Molly Suber Thorpe

Lettering and calligraphy are art forms that are often mentioned together. Lettering is the art of drawing letterforms, and calligraphy is the art of writing them. In this course by Molly Suber Thorpe, you’ll learn how to create digital brush lettering in Procreate.

You’ll start with how to set up your canvas and learn the basic brush strokes. Once you have those down, you’ll be able to begin creating the entire alphabet of lowercase and uppercase letters. You’ll also get a lot of free downloadable content that goes with your course, like brushes and practice sheets to aid your learning.

Molly Suber Thorpe is a calligrapher, teacher, and author specializing in modern calligraphy and handwriting. Her courses teach other artists how to hone their skills and expand them into successful careers. She also designs custom lettering for a variety of clients.

3D Letters Masterclass by Aurelie Maron

If you’re interested in the special details that make digital lettering pop on screen, this is the course to take. This course by Aurelie Maron is specifically tailored to creating dimensional lettering with detail and flair.

This is a masterclass designed to take you from start to finish with your own 3D lettering piece. With two hours of video content, you’ll learn the basics of type classification, how to sketch and build the foundation of your letter, and even how to create a balanced color palette for your piece.

When you enroll in the course, you’ll also receive a download of a 17-page handbook to supplement your learning.

Aurelie Maron is a lettering artist and designer. She has created numerous courses that cover how to achieve her signature styles and detailed lettering. She is also the creator of the Lettering Style Challenge.

Intro to Illustrative Lettering on the iPad by Chris Piascik

Lettering is a skill that any artist can learn. It can enhance your illustrations by adding dynamic quotes or phrases. Through 12 video lessons, Chris Piascik will teach you how to create harmony between your lettering and illustrations.

This course is great for illustrators who are looking for tips, tricks, and guidance for composing their own text-based illustration. You’ll learn typographic fundamentals, different lettering styles, techniques for adding detail, and more.

Chris Piascik is a lettering artist, illustrator, and Skillshare teacher with over 15 years of freelance experience. His YouTube channel teaches others how to use popular drawing programs, explore their creativity, and more.

Best online classes for digital painting

Digital painting is a beautiful way of encapsulating the famous medium. Much like using a paintbrush, the brushes in your programs will be your key to mastery.

Being able to know how to control and blend your strokes will come with time and help from these courses. They’ll help you train your eye, use color, and more.

Plein Air Painting with Procreate by Mike McCain

Plein Air Painting is a French-inspired artistic practice of painting outside. In this course, you’ll learn how to digitally paint an outdoor scene. With a powerful, portable device like an iPad, you can practice your painting skills wherever you are.

Mike will teach you techniques designed to help you develop your understanding of light, color, and value. Even if you think it seems impossible to capture the change of the landscape as you sit and observe it. By the end of the course, you’ll be prepared for great outdoor digital painting sessions.

Mike McCain is a Game Director and CEO at Harebrained. He works in the animation industry and teaches courses to help other artists improve their skills.

Painting a Winter City Scene in Procreate by Nikolai Lockertsen

Focusing on a winter city scene, you’ll learn Nikolai’s painting process from sketch to finished piece. He starts with blocking out your scene in basic forms, and then moves through values, color, and details to bring your scene to life.

You’ll also learn workflow tips for Procreate, including using the QuickMenu and gestures. Optionally, you can purchase his brush pack to use exactly the same brushes as Nikolai through the course.

Nikolai Lockertsen is a freelance concept artist, illustrator, and animator. He has worked on over 30 feature films, TV productions, and commercials. He’s an early pioneer of iPad art and enjoys sharing his knowledge and process with other artists.

Getting Started with Digital Painting by Marco Bucci

There are three program options for this course: Procreate, Photoshop, and Krita. You can watch the interface overviews and learn to optimize your workflow in any of these programs. This gives students a lot of flexibility with their preferred program.

In the course, Marco covers process, brushwork, editing, and layering. These concepts will help your work mimic traditional painting materials. Using a variety of assignments, you’ll be able to practice what you’re learning and get feedback.

Included with the course, you’ll receive brushes compatible with Procreate and Photoshop to complete your paintings.

Marco Bucci is a professional concept artist and illustrator with over 15 years of experience. He’s worked with Disney, DreamWorks, and game companies. His courses help artists understand the principal skills that make great work.

Photorealistic Digital Painting From Beginner to Advanced by Austin Batchelor

Achieving realism in a painting takes exceptional skill and patience. By taking this course, you’ll learn how to create photorealistic paintings using Procreate and Photoshop no matter your skill level.

You’ll start with an underdrawing created from a reference to base your painting on. Then Austin will take you through adding color, light, shadows, and effects.

Students will learn a lot from this five-hour course with 6 modules and 32 videos. He also shares additional tips and advice for building a professional portfolio.

Austin Batchelor is a professional creative in the game industry as a concept artist and illustrator. His courses have helped over 100,000 students improve their skills as digital artists.

Best online classes for character design

Great character design is the secret behind your favorite media. But creating your own characters is harder than it looks.

Learning this process is a unique challenge that will teach you how to use simple forms to bring new, cool characters to life.

Draw Your First Character by KeshArt

It might sound surprising, but you don’t need to know complex anatomy to be able to create a character. Kesh’s course teaches you in just under an hour the entire process of character design using basic foundational forms.

You’ll start with essential warm-ups to exercise your hand and mind. Kesh emphasizes loose lines and a relaxed approach. Then he takes you through making a character step by step. You can also download his character drawing worksheet for free to help you follow along even better.

Kesh is an artist, illustrator, and YouTuber sharing his tutorials and courses online. He’s taught over 50,000 students how to draw through his art program, Drawing Camp.

Line and Color Mini-Course by Tim McBurnie of The Drawing Codex

Your process will be what you go back to over the course of your career. Without one, technique and tools fall apart. That’s at the heart of Tim McBurnie’s course showing you how to create a fantasy creature.

In this mini-course, you’ll get 4.5 hours of videos from his Drawing Codex platform. With over 20 years of experience, you’ll learn Tim’s drawing process for a fantasy creature from ideation to final looks and details. He goes through his process in detail, sharing what will actually make your next piece more successful.

The course also comes with demo PSD files and brushes so you can follow along more closely.

Tim McBurnie is a freelance concept designer, illustrator, and author. He specializes in character design and story development with clients including Blizzard Entertainment, Wizards of the Coast, and Gunfire Games.

How to draw cartoon characters in Procreate by Brad Colbow

There’s a nostalgic charm and playfulness to cartoon characters. That’s part of what makes it a popular style of character drawing. In this course, Brad Colbow will teach you how to combine basic shapes to create your first character, even if you’re a beginner.

He begins with foundational basics, then you’ll develop your sketches so that your characters look unique to you and your style. You’ll also learn how to communicate emotion and personality in your characters to bring them to life.

Brad Colbow is an artist, teacher, and YouTuber sharing product reviews, tutorials, and digital art news on social media.

Character Design for Beginners by Alexandra Finta

Want to stop avoiding drawing human characters? Learn how to draw and design a stylized human character in Procreate in this course by Alexandra Finta. Using a professional illustration workflow, you’ll learn to capture expressions and the essence of your character.

You’ll go through shape, proportion, and concepting to help you build the foundation of your drawing. Then you’ll work through the form until you’ve created your first complete human character design, even if you have no prior drawing experience!

Alexandra Finta is a professional art teacher, artist, and illustrator. She has taught over 60,000 students worldwide with an impressive catalog of over 30 courses teaching across different fields of art.

Best online classes for animation

Animation will bring your work to life in ways you didn’t expect. For many artists, it’s one of the more daunting disciplines to learn because it seems complicated.

Thankfully, there are amazing tools and programs that help you leverage your illustration skills and apply them to your animation. You might even be surprised how easy it is.

Create Magic Animations in Procreate Dreams 2 by Lisa Bardot & Skillshare Live

Animation in Procreate Dreams takes the basic animation features of Procreate up a notch. Procreate Dreams is the latest 2D animation and motion design program from Savage Interactive. It’s great for creating animations, especially if you’re already a Procreate illustrator.

In this livestream course with Lisa Bardot and Skillshare, you’ll learn how to navigate the interface, create a basic frame-by-frame animation, and more.

If you’ve previously animated in Procreate, you’ll discover even more features that are unique to Procreate Dreams, like Perform. By automatically recording your movements, it’s a way for anyone to get started with their own animations.

Lisa Bardot of Bardot Brush is an illustrator who creates digital art tutorials and premium brushes for Procreate. You can check out her online shop, artist community, and templates on her website.

Mastering Procreate Dreams 2 by Alex Grigg

Animation doesn’t have to be complicated. In this animation course for Procreate Dreams 2, Alex Grigg will break it down into the most important techniques and tools in Procreate Dreams. It’s a great way to learn the program for animators of all skill levels of animators because it’s still a new program.

You’ll be creating your own project as you take the course so you can work towards your animation goals. He provides seven chapters and 25 easy-to-follow lessons that get you animating in the first 10 minutes of the course.

Included with the course is access to a private learning community of fellow students where you can continue your learning and ask questions. As a fun bonus, you’ll also get five custom brushes to give your backgrounds a beautiful texture.

Alex Grigg is an animator and animation director with over 15 years of professional experience. His freelance clients include Cartoon Network, Apple, Samsung, and Procreate.

Easy Animation for Illustrators with Adobe Fresco on the iPad by Chris Piascik

Animation is easier than ever in Adobe Fresco. It’s so easy that Chris Piascik put the word in the title of the course! In it, you’ll learn how to sketch a scene with characters and combine different animation techniques.

The course project will be to create an underwater scene with three or more animated elements. You can reference the Scene Practice PSD file that Chris includes with the course to help you follow along. You’ll even be able to animate type and incorporate dynamic movement into your Adobe Fresco illustrations.

The best part is that Adobe Fresco is free to use, so you’ll only need an Adobe ID to jump into this course.

Chris Piascik is a lettering artist, illustrator, and Skillshare teacher with over 15 years of freelance experience. His YouTube channel teaches others how to use popular drawing programs, explore their creativity, and more.

Wrap up

Embrace the thrill of being a student again. Start with these online classes to brush up on old skills and learn new ones. You might be surprised by what comes out of your creativity once you do.

And if you want to work confidently on your iPad no matter what class you choose, Paperlike can help.

The Paperlike Screen Protector will give your iPad a paper feel so your Apple Pencil doesn’t slip against your screen. This gives you the ability to stay focused on what matters.