Below is a copy of a message that I sent on an art Discord server. The question was: Has anyone tried Coloso before? And any thoughts on it?
I figured it’d be useful to put it here where people with search engines can find it. Hope you enjoy the mini review of Coloso, Chyan’s Art Course, and Cindy Law’s Art Course.
sure, i can provide some thoughts on chyan’s course (and coloso in general).
- coloso’s drm kinda sucks and is annoying to deal with. on pc it runs in the background constantly using a tiny amount of cpu unless you kill the task. on mac it seems fine because it uses a separate player software. the experience was slightly better on mobile. they do seem to be actively updating the software so it’s slowly improving, but not fast enough imo
- chyan’s course itself is pretty good imo, but it expects you to know the fundamentals. it’s marketed as a beginner-intermediate course, but i think it’ll be more useful if you already have a surface level understanding of things like line drawing and painting (with color). it’s very focused on the workflow of anime style illustrations from beginning to end, with some character design stuff. heavy focus on composition (early part of the course) and how it combines with fundamentals to produce a “finished” illustration. chyan does briefly summarize the relevant fundamentals at the start of each topic, so you won’t get lost though. i found the end of the course to be kind of repetitive since chyan goes through a large number of variants of the same painting to explain how to get different vibes, but it was still useful
- the extended part of the course (called CLASS+) goes back and covers the drawing and painting stuff that weren’t covered in the main course. i’m not sure this part is worth the upgrade over the regular course, since the info i got from it was mostly stuff i already learned on yt through self teaching
- the other course i took (partially) was cindy law’s semirealistic painting course. i didn’t like it tbh, but it wasn’t as expensive as a lot of other courses. it seems like course quality varies a lot on coloso
- summary: it was useful for me, but i don’t know if chyan’s course is a good investment unless you’re already got good fundamentals down (or are dead set on having a crash course anime illustration class)
imo coloso is pretty overhyped. there’s definitely stuff that might be useful in there, but it’s really expensive and i don’t know their courses are a good value unless you know specifically what you’re looking to learn
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