Inkscape Master Class is in the books

I’m learning to draw (better)

I just finished Nick Saporito’s Inkscape Masterclass. If you know me, you probably know I’ve taught Inkscape to kids. Below is a video I made back in 2016 and I’ve been using Inkscape since 2006. So why would I, an Inkscape user for nearly 18 years and someone who has taught Inkscape, take an Inkscape class? Because I wanted to broaden and deepen my knowledge of its finer points. I maybe had 60% of it down pat, but the other 40%…

And it was good. It gave me exactly what I wanted. I discovered things I hadn’t known about Inkscape and feel a lot more confident trying to learn to draw a wide variety of things using its drawing tools and a mouse instead of a sketchpad and pencil or drawing on my iPad with the Apple pen.

This is something I created while messing around with the pen tool in Inkscape. It’s nothing intentional, but sometimes you can create interesting things while messing around.

With Nick’s class completed yesterday, I’m now 18 lessons into Scott Harris’s Character Art School at Udemy. He stresses sketching a lot in the early parts, but I feel I’ll still come out with a lot of stuff I can use in Inkscape to create better faces, poses, and overall manga / cartoon / comic characters. I also have some courses in anatomy and pin-ups by Neil Fontaine on deck.

But why are you learning to draw?

“Okay, Greg,” you might say. “But your goal is to understand how you can be a 10x artist with the aid of AI. Why are you learning to draw?” Because I still want the end product to be mine. I want to create cool stuff, then have AI help me take it to the next level, not have AI do everything. Part of it is so I can legally own my final products, but the bigger part is so I can claim them as mine and know it in my soul that I didn’t use AI to steal someone else’s talent, but to magnify my own.

“Magnify my own,” may sound arrogant, but the act of showing your art to an audience has an implied confidence in the value of your work. If I don’t believe I have talent to magnify, worth magnifying, why am I doing this? Artists who seek an audience have to believe that they’re making stuff others will consider to be worth experiencing. They must have a certain level of self-confidence and belief both in the existence of their talent and that others will appreciate that talent (or the artifacts it produces). There’s a difference between confidence and arrogance, between believing you’re good enough to find an audience and believing you’re so great you deserve an audience.

I appreciate each and every person who considers me worth following, considers my output worth experiencing/consuming. I try to find a middle ground between “only idiots would like what I create” and “I am God’s gift.” In the meantime, I’m just learning and not holding myself to any expectations that I’ll produce fan-worthy content for at least another couple of years yet.

We’ll see. This blog had all of 9 unique visitors in the last month. I’m not promoting it heavily. Posts like this are more for posterity and long tail SEO. But how many average monthly visitors are my goal?

Learning Period
January 2025: 40 per month
January 2026: 100 per month

Content Push begins
January 2027: 600 per month
January 2028: 1400 per month
January 2029: 5,000 per month

Can I reach that? Follow me and find out.

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