Solo Art Curriculum

TLDR: The Solo Art Curriculum has now moved and is available here... https://www.soloartcurriculum.com/

I received the following in my inbox recently...

I just wanted to say thank you for your solo illustration curriculum. Earlier this year I decided I want to be an illustrator but I have absolutely no money for schooling. Your curriculum was a life saver for me this past year.

Thank you for such a sweet message.

I occasionally receive emails like this, and I've had a few personal friends in the London Art Community thank me in person after they realise that it's me who hosts the site they've been referring to while embarking on their own art journey. It always brings me a lot of joy to know that this resource has helped and inspired someone in the same way it helped and inspired me. I don't have money for art schooling either, but I honestly believe that money shouldn't be a barrier to someone learning art.

I can't take responsibility for the curriculum itself. It was put together by someone using the handle "radio runner". I've never spoken to or communicated with this person, but all credit for this wonderful resource should go to them, including the visual design. I found a beautifully designed image that contained all this content which they put together. I really admired the effort and thought that had gone into it, but as a very large static image I found it cumbersome to navigate.

I wanted to make this invaluable resource easier for me to navigate, and since I was unemployed at the time I had some time on my hands to do just that. I also wanted to develop my web portfolio and showcase my skills as a web developer, and I could see some nice challenges in the design so I decided to turn it into a web page. It then made sense to upload it somewhere, so I could share it with potential employers but more importantly I could access it from anywhere. 

To my surprise it got discovered and the page started getting a large amount of traffic from google and from social media. I intended this purely as a resource for myself and I didn't do anything to optimise it for search engines or market it, but it still got found. The amount of traffic it started getting started scaring me a little bit, I'd never made something that became so visible before, but in the end I thought if other people find it useful I might as well leave it as it is.

Originally I hosted the page from my own website, which at the time was focussed on my photography from the time I spent travelling the world. I did this because it was cheap and easy. Overtime my site evolved. I remember over a weekend I frantically redesigned my site into a small portfolio of my life drawings. This was because after a public portrait drawing session in Central London I got approached by someone who seemed to be well off as to whether I sold my drawings, and if they could buy them. They wanted a link to view my work but refused to accept an Instagram profile so I gave them a web address, then paniced went home and redesigned my site.

I've since had a lot of offers to buy my work from casual attendees at life drawing sessions, and I used to get asked a lot if I was a professional artist and if I could advise on how to become one. I wasn't a professional artist and really didn't have any clue what to say to those people, but I was sincerely flattered they liked my work. Eventually this gave me confidence to treat my art pursuits more seriously, and I was encouraged by Dr Sarah Lightman at the Royal Drawing School to really pursue my real goals and make comics. 

All of this really meant I needed a new transactional website for myself, which is the current iteration you're looking at. It's not much as I had a really hard time building a website for someone else (who didn't pay me) but it's a decent foundation. Unfortunately this meant I had to put the Solo Art Curriculum elsewhere so I could protect the bandwidth of my personal website. This meant buying a new domain name, which I paid for the first year of, and then seeked donations for the second year via Ko-Fi (thank you all who donated). The Solo Art Curriculum now lives here... https://www.soloartcurriculum.com/

It made sense to me that the Solo Art Curriculum should be a standalone resource on it's own, seperate from me website. It's so much bigger than what I do, and I wasn't even the original creator, Radio Runner put the hard work in and can take credit for that. I was always a bit uncomfortable having my own personal domain name attached to it.

Thank you Radio Runner for creating the curriculum and for sharing it. The curriculum is now available here https://www.soloartcurriculum.com/

Written by Bren on Sunday, December 15, 2024