Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu - Update

I got an ‘A’ grade for the course I recently completed, which obviously I was very happy about. As I am by nature slightly (some would say very) negative, self doubting and lacking in confidence in any abilities I may or may not possess I emailed the Schoolism website to ask about the grades (as I thought maybe everyone gets an A?).

Here is their reply:

‘We don't really track final grades; all students are marked independently of one another (i.e. we don't grade on a curve).

Nevertheless, I asked Bobby just now how the grade distribution is, and he said most of his Self-Taught students finish with B's.

(To give you some insight: obviously, all instructors mark according to their own individual baselines; how Bobby does it is, an "A" means the student is painting at a professional level, a "B" means the student is on the cusp of being professional, and "C" means the student still has some work to do before being able to market their work commercially.

The mark distribution for Self-Taught is different from Critiqued Sessions because we don't recommend beginners to take Self-Taught, as they would generally benefit most from the instructor's personalized critiques, hence the high percentage of B's in Bobby's Self-Taught.)’

So according to this I’m painting at a professional level! I take this very much with a pinch of salt.

I consider myself to be very much a beginner at any kind of painting so I guess there is hope for me yet. I'm definitely encouraged to continue anyway.  I think the real test will be to see how my next effort at painting turns out, having a go without an expert like Bobby Chiu there to help me. I’m thinking of doing a Frank Frazetta style barbarian or maybe something from Hellboy.

I’d recommend ‘Digital painting with Bobby Chiu’ to anyone who’s interested in learning how to paint in photoshop, especially if you’re interested in the fantasy art type of stuff, it is a great course if maybe a little pricey (I thought about it for quite a while before deciding, the self taught course is half the price of the one to one version).
I really enjoyed doing it.

Click here to visit schoolism.com