Character Art Course Review

by Javantea
May 4-5, 2025

I’m getting closer to the end of Scott Harris’ Character Art Course. I started in 2020 and tried to do as much of the homework as I could. As I learned more, I realized how difficult the homework would be to do legitimately. I wrote down the time commitment he was suggesting and it is massive. Here I’ll do a bit of the math just for fun. See below. If you want to become a good artist, you need to have a lot of muscle memory. Where does that muscle memory come from? From drawing, painting, and so on. If you have time and want to get to it, the homework is a pretty powerful tool. Along with the course which explains why bad drawings look bad, how to improve your character art, and so on, this course is something else. This blog post goes into my experience.

I’m not going to say it’s perfect. If it was, I would’ve finished the course and by now I’d be a skilled artist.. Oh wait. I think it makes sense to draw to show you what I mean. You see M1A1, the first assignment (module 1 assignment 1) tells us to draw a character so that we can look back over time to see how much our art has improved. This is helpful in getting a mindset of growth – that you most certainly need. Because if you’re taking a drawing course, you probably think that your character art looks bad. How do we go about understanding good vs bad?

Oh no! Philosophy has made its way into this art course review. Yeah, that was inevitable. The Tl;dr for this philosophy section is: art is especially difficult because we have hardware in our head to detect minute differences between what we see and what we know. This hardware tells us that our drawing is bad – when it is bad or not. You might think that once your art gets to be to the quality of photorealism or pro comic artist (or manga ka) or artstation trending that you immediately see your art as being excellent. Well, … artists tell students to persevere this unfortunate attitude.

So what does good character art look like? Luckily for us, we have a wealth of high quality character art!

So now that we have a pretty wide assortment of art to consider good, it’s time to figure out what is bad. Philosophy has a lot to say about bad, which is why I think it’s such a cool topic. What makes something bad? And instead of getting into crime and evil, I think it’s fair to keep on topic of art. Bad is something that glaringly fails to communicate. It’s difficult to put into words, so I’ll just put it in something that everyone should be able to see.

So what is wrong with this drawing? Well, first off there may be a small number of people who can’t see it. For those people, I sincerely apologize that I have to communicate with the rest of the world as well. The shape of the head is slightly off. The shape of the body is slightly off. The shape of the facial features are slightly off. The whole drawing is a sketch instead of a finished piece, so many people may give it a lot of credit for just being a sketch. But if you saw this in a manga or a video game, you’d wonder what was going on. And that is where most bad comes from – context. In the same way that a joke is not funny if you lack context, it’s possible for an artwork to not be art with incorrect context. But it’s also possible for art to look bad in any context. This is where we can define the discussion above about art. The shapes are subtly wrong. How do we know that they are wrong?

Let’s switch briefly to a photo. When taking a photo, we will notice right away when the photo looks wrong. Despite being photorealistic representation of reality, there is something wrong. For some of us it can’t be easily fixed. For others though, quite small adjustments result in high quality photos. So what’s going on here? Photogenic people are photogenic because their shapes tend to look right – not to everyone mind you. We aren’t talking about the edge cases of beauty right now. We’re talking about a random sample of people saying yes or no to a question of is this a good photo? And there we have our definition. Because there are edge cases, people can make all kinds of cool assertions and have deep philosophical discussions. This is where a lot of our society is. But we don’t need to go into that.

So now we have an explanation of why we have a character art course. Now let’s get into what Scott Harris offers. First off, his course is quite good at front loading important concepts. In module 1 there is a ton of stuff that is meta (talking about the process of becoming an artist) which really helps people who pay close attention to their lecturer’s ideas. A lot of people get stuck on these things which I’m leaving out so that you’ll go check out the toc. Seriously. Module 2 is learning to draw. Module 3 is learning to draw the human form. Module 4 is gesture drawing, an important part in the process. Module 5 is workflow – how to get higher quality outcomes. Module 6 is composition and design, just improving the strategy. Module 7 is the face, which is really important. Module 8 and 9 I haven’t done yet, but you can look in the table of contents if you are curious.

Time Commitment

Module 1: 3-4 hours
Module 2: 9-15 hours per week
Module 3: 7 hours per week + 33 hours
Module 4: 35 hours + 5-60 minutes daily
Module 5: 4-12 hours daily/every 2nd day
Module 6: 40 hours
Module 7: 3 hours per week + 2-3 hours per month
Module 8: 4 hours per week + 10 hours
Module 9: 15-30 hours

Note how if you want to finish Module 3 in 1 week, you need to spend 40 hours drawing. If you take 2 weeks, you are spending 23 hours per week, not 20. Anyways the design of this course is to take months of time in homework. If you can’t do that, you can’t actually finish the course as designed. Let’s assume that we have 40 hours per week to spend drawing (which is very realistic for someone who has a ton of free time due to flexible schedule). Module 1 and 2 can be done in the first week. Module 3 can be done in week 2. Module 4 can be done in week 3. Module 5 can be done in week 4. Module 6 can be done in week 5. Module 7 can be done in 1 day. Module 8 can be done in 2 days. Module 9 can be done in week 6 + 2 days in to week 7. So in 7 weeks you can learn to draw really well – if you have 40 hours per week to draw. If you do art as an obsession that you’d like to turn into a career, it makes a lot of sense that you’d have 20 hours per week to work on it. But remember that the per week stuff adds up if you cut your hours in half. So instead of 14 weeks, the course is probably going to take 16 weeks.

So what did I do? Well I did Module 1 and 2 no problem. Then for Module 3 I did my best until life interrupted and I completely stopped on homework to work on other projects. I kept on watching the lectures and kept drawing from time to time, but my hours were less than 2 per week. At this commitment level, it’s quite impossible to complete the course because of the module 3’s minimum commitment of 7 hours per week. 7 hours per week is a lot. I do think that it’s possible for someone like me to finish this course as intended, but I also think that the homework is not reasonable.

Wait, what?

If we forget about the homework, this course is about learning to put pencil, pen, or brush to paper and creating works of art. It isn’t about earning a certificate of completion and it isn’t about getting a job in the industry. All that will result from work you do outside of this class. But being a darn good artist is a heck of a thing to have on your resume. A portfolio with some of the stuff you made in module 9 and module 6 would really impress people. But more importantly I think is that the skill of drawing is really impactful for someone who cares about art.

We are at an incredible point in the world of art right now. I’m not just talking about the machine learning revolution that occurred in the past 3 years. The ability for artists to be paid for their work on the internet is really exciting. I don’t know where this is headed, but when I see artists paying their rent from Patreon, I am enthusiastic about what the art community has done. It’s true that artists are in a weird place right now, but I don’t think that it’s doom.

So this course is especially important to me because it’s a step on the way to being able to draw well. I’ve been drawing since 1994 and that’s a long time to be at this level.

So how far have I come since I started this course in 2020? There are a lot of things Let’s take a look at M1A1 and compare to my current work. First of all, you might laugh at M1A1, but I literally took it from a frame of anime. I was like, yup that’s what I want to draw and then measured it and drew it. I even have the frame and the anime that I took it from (5 centimeters per second). So this time no cheating, no tracing, no AI, no help from anyone. I was planning on using a human reference but I didn’t.

M1A1 Apr 9, 2020

M1A1 by Javantea based off of a character from 5 centimeters per second

May 5, 2025

Beyond just raw skill, there’s a lot of things that this course teaches – philosophy, strategy, perseverance, meta. Most important of these non-art skills is being able to understand what you are trying to do in a complicated way. Let’s get into that and hopefully it’ll help you (and encourage you to get the course on sale). When you’re drawing there are 3 systems that you have to take into account. First off is drawing a photo. Your goal is not to reproduce the photo obviously because you only have pen or pencil. There’s no shading in this course. There’s no painting, nada. We’re talking about line art. You get line thickness, dots, and shade of lines. So how do you make that happen? If you trace a photo, you’ll find a pretty decent reproduction of the likeness of the original photo. But wait, it’s not exactly right is it? Second is workflow to your end goal. That involves like 4 draws of the same subject – guide, sketch, draw, and redraw. Third is gesture. Unlike the workflow or the ~~tracing~~ drawing from reference, gesture attempts to capture something. You don’t normally have much time in gesture so the process is different.

Conclusion

So I am a strong proponent of this course. At its sale price, Character Art School is an excellent deal. The community is outstanding (and has gone through some really tough changes over the last 5 years) and worth the price of the course. Each person in the community is part of one of the schools that Scott Harris teaches, so you’re among a wide variety of peers. The content of the course is excellent.

Now let’s discuss the critique. The homework is unrealistic to actually complete. I discussed in length above. If you’re unemployed and not looking for work, you can put 40 hours into a 7 week course. If not, you will be forced to do less. Scott is not the best artist in the world. It is a very difficult balance to be a top artist and a good teacher and a good entrepreneur. If you want a better artist to teach you, you may find that he/she may not be a good teacher. It’s pretty clear that those top artists that are also good teachers that aren’t good entrepreneurs will not reach a wide audience because of how our society works. Compared to other ways of learning to draw (books, youtube, tutorials), Scott Harris’s courses are top tier.

So how do we complete this review? I think it makes sense to finish with a heart felt thank you to Scott. I don’t know if I would’ve done it if I hadn’t found your course.

Javantea out.