Artist resources

Tutorials and knowledge!

  • Arne’s Tutorial – A very informative listing of terms and concepts “how art works and what makes pictures look good”.
  • Ctrl + Paint – Plenty of really good tutorials, both traditional drawing and digital painting.
  • FZD School of Design YouTube Channel – Illustration and concept art tips and tutorials. For intermediate and advanced.
  • Proko – Stan Prokopenko’s drawing tutorials, mainly realistic figure drawing and anatomy.
  • Drawing Tutorials Online – While this is a paid course, registering gives you access to few free, and very useful figure drawing tutorials and some inspirational videos.
  • Mark Crilley’s YouTube channel – Mike Crilley uploads step by step videos of his art. While they’re more of a walkthrough instead of a tutorial, most of them are a very helpful “inside-look”.

Inspiration

  • Abduzeedo – The best graphic inspiration blog in my opinion. While it deals mostly with design, you can encounter illustrative works every once in a while.
  • Character Design Page – Inspirational blog about character designs and stylization of the human form. Also on FaceBook.
  • Logo Pond – Logo Design inspiration.
  • Web Creme – Give them a visit if you want to take a look at some beautiful web sites.
  • CG Society Gallery – Top of the line digital art, both 2d & 3d.
  • Spriters Resource and it’s subsidiaries – Awesome reference/inspiration if you need to take a direct look at game art like sprites or textures.

Reference images & random/timed images

  • Posemaniacs – Great reference for character poses, but limited amount of character/anatomy types. Features practice random image and timed gesture practice tool, and few anatomic 3d scans you can freely rotate.
  • Quick Poses – random human anatomy image archive and gesture practice tools. Best source for reference images to practice human form – you can choose either full body images, portraits, hands or feet.
  • Figure & Gesture Practice Tool – Similar to the above link, but with a different image archive. Also features an animal random image archive with gesture practice.
  • Josef Zrzavy Anatomy book scans at fineart.sk – Scanned pages of an old, Czech anatomy for artists book. Don’t worry if you don’t understand Czech, there’s plenty of useful illustrations.
  • Stock Images category at DeviantArt – DeviantArt is community based, so it’s a mixed bag, since you can find some good reference/stock pictures as well as junk images. Users who are dedicated stock uploaders are your best bet.

Resources

Gaming resources

  • Hardcore Gaming 101 – Plenty of interesting articles about games from various platforms, their development and creators, as well as various phenomena and “gameisms”.
  • MobyGames – Might be the most comprehensive video game listing, spanning different platforms.
  • Hall Of Light & Lemon Amiga – If you’re looking for information strictly on Amiga games only, those are the places to go.
  • The Cutting Room Floor – If you’re curious about features dropped from games during development, hidden content and similar “backstage” stuff, this is the site for you.
  • Lazy Game Reviews – My favorite YouTube channel about old school (and not only) gaming and hardware.