17 New Videos for the Early Lessons!

Yule Tidings, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! In honour of the holiday season, I spent the last couple days recording a whopping 17 new videos - an intro video detailing how to approach the lessons, one for every exercise in lessons 1 and 2, and a new version of 'how to draw a box'.

 You can find all the videos on this playlist.  They're also linked directly from each exercise's instructions in the lessons themselves. 

While lessons 3-7 did have more video content, the most important lessons (the basics) were sorely lacking in it. Hopefully this should make things easier for those of you who struggle with absorbing information in a purely textual format. The videos still should be watched alongside reading the lessons, but I'm hoping that this will help you guys catch certain instructions that you might otherwise miss or forget by having them repeated in different formats.

Lastly, I'm hoping to create a handful of more videos for lessons 3-7, so keep an eye out for those.

This is actually a change that involves my patrons specifically. When I first started this patreon, I made a handful of no-audio recordings of me working through the demos for lessons 3-7. I made these available for patrons only, largely as a symbolic thank you gesture.

Some of the new videos I'll be making will be replacing those I feel aren't up to scratch - but I'll be making them available to everyone for free. At the same time, I'd like to take the existing patron-only demos that are available and open them up to everyone as well.

I've never felt entirely comfortable with the pay-walled video content, as it's been an attempt at conforming to the standard patreon way of doing things (you give me money, i give you stuff). While that makes perfect sense for my critiques (as each one eats up some of my time), the videos simply exist as content that has already been made. Just like the lessons, I don't feel that they should be held back.

That said, while $3+ patrons have access to critiques and all, the videos are the only additional benefit the $1 patrons receive. Making them freely available to everyone would remove the only actual reward that tier receives. So, before I go and make this change, I'd like to hear if any of you would be bothered by this change, or if you guys also see this patreon as more of a continuous-donation-drive to keep the website alive and healthy.