#198 - The Rise Of The Artist APP

A new way of learning for artists?

There is something interesting happening at the moment: educational sites are coming out with APPs that help artists practice drawing, and I want to talk about that a bit.

I think it was Proko that started the online art education thing that you can now find on many sites: You have courses you pay for, the courses have videos, and maybe material to download for exercises. There is a forum where students can talk to each other and the teachers, and there is a place where you can upload your homework for review, to be critiqued by the teacher, and there are email notifications.

It’s a clever way to tie lots of digital services together: online video streaming platforms, forums, email, websites with downloadable things, all combined to form the digital variant of a brick-and-mortar school.

It’s relatively easy to do and so many people are doing it now, but there once was a first person to do it, I believe it was Stan Prokopenko, and he must have had push-back from the art teaching community which probably thought he was doing the same thing but doing it wrong, that teaching should be done at brick-and-mortar academies where students could interact with teachers.

The digital academy was a new product category, as business types would say.

Fast-forward and DuoLingo arrives on the scene, popularizing the idea of an APP that can help you learn things. While the metaphor for online teaching academies was the bricks-and-mortar art academy, with DuoLingo the metaphor became game consoles.

They leave nothing off the table to use techniques from gaming to gamify the learning experience, to make it addictive.

We art students have to make do with Google Image search and Pinterest for a while to find reference images to use for drawing practice.

But now, there’s again a new product category arriving on the scene for art students! APPs designed to help students practice drawing. Three of them arrived on the market at around the same time, the beginning of 2025: Practice Drawing This came out with Art Flashcards , Proko came out with Zolly , and Artwod came out with its app. I will discuss the state of each of them below. All three of them are built on the same basic ideas of:

Instantly providing drawing reference to use for drawing.
Lesson material.
A way to gain feedback on your work.

With all three of them, you have the APP on your mobile in your pocket, ready to be taken out at any time to start drawing instantly.

Just make sure you also have a sketchbook and pen with you, and you can practice drawing at any time. (Well, for the Artwod app, even that is not true. More on that later.)

These apps solve the problem of not knowing what to draw!

You just open the APP and start drawing.

This time, it is a bit different in that while it was relatively easy to recreate the art academy experience with off-the-shelf tech like video streaming platforms and forums and such, the APP requires a dedicated and experienced team of developers and designers to get it right. The APP needs a lot of imagery the art student can use, it needs to be intuitive and easy and frankly fun to use, and it needs to be be addictive like a game. This requires highly skilled developers and designers, so I don’t expect there to be many alternatives popping up, especially since there isn’t really that much money to be made this way.

Others can do it, but realize that if you put this much effort into an APP, you could also be developing an APP for mainstream with the same effort and make way more money. This is for the few who want to make art education material no matter what. Because there are better ways to make money.

So let’s dive into the different APPs available at the moment.

Art Flashcards

I’ll start with the Art Flashcards on Practice Drawing This.

Academic students use flashcards to learn stuff. Each flashcard has a question with the answer on the back, and the student can test themselves. If they get it wrong, they have to try to consciously come up with a mnemonic to memorize it, to remember it for next time. Then they file it in a box of flashcards, putting it near front if they didn’t get it right, and more in the back if they did.

Nowadays, there are also APPs for that (of course!) that try to optimize the scheduling algorithm.

I realized we could use a system like that for drawing practice! And hence the Art Flashcards system was born. After doing a quick warm-up each day designed to make you better at drawing lines accurately, it presents you with an image to use for reference. You go from drawing gesture, to shape studies, to form studies, to drawing from observation, from memory, then rotated, eventually also from memory. I starts with simpler reference and the reference gets harder, and the tasks get harder. You tell it how well you think you did, and it will schedule the image into the future based on how well you say you did.

So what about feedback on your work? The Art Flashcards has a novel system for this: the student critiques themselves!

Hear me out!

The power of doing memory drawing exercises, which is a part of the Art Flashcards system, is actually not that you memorize that thing as much as that you become better at visualizing what you want to draw, and become better at seeing where lines need to go and, when they are off, to be able to see that and to see why they are off.

You effectively become your own teacher, you become able to critique your work as an experienced teacher would be able to do.

The Art Flashcards system also keeps statistics for you, and you can do timed sessions for just one specific type of reference if you want.

The Practice Drawng This Art Flashcards system has one specific type of reference you will not find anywhere else, at least at the moment: parametric 3D models!

This is important enough to explain.

Parametric 3D models are 3D models that are generated through code, using mathematical formulas. This has the advantage that you can leave certain proportions open, so that you can randomize them each time they are shown. For a cylinder, you can change the radius and the height. For an opened chest, you can change how far it has been opened, making the angle a parameter. The rotation can of course also be randomized, but you can do that with static 3D models, too. What is revolutionary is that the proportions and angles that define the model can be randomized now, too. No other APP has that at the moment.

Another thing with the 3D models is that I tried to place them into boxes as much as possible so that you can practice drawing rotated boxes and then practice placing things into these rotated boxes.

The Art Flashcards APP is free. You don’t need to install an APP as it runs inside your browser, and there is no need to create an account. All your data is stored in your mobile phone, inside the browser.

Proko’s Zolly

Proko developed Zolly , a stand-alone app that has 3D models you can use for drawing practice. They did this for the perspective course developed with Marshall Vandruff.

Some model sets come for free, and you can buy additional 3D model packs.

It currently seems to be in its early stages. The interaction design is currently a bit wonky, and if I may be frank, many of the 3D models don’t seem that suited to drawing practice. They don’t have parametric models. Yet, I should say.

Having said that, Proko of course has a huge team, so it will be interesting to see where they take it.

Feedback on your homework is through their website, their forums. They have so many students that a teacher picks out a few where they think their feedback can be the most instructive for all students, and they make a video where they give feedback on student work. These videos are highly useful, you learn a lot from them as a student. The feedback often also applies to your own work.

Proko is the premium source of art education. Proko arguably has among the best art education courses online. If I may be very honest, the APP doesn’t reflect that yet, but I am sure they will develop it further in the future.

Proko can not easily be copied, as it has such a wide roster of unique and high-quality lesson material. I hope they will come up with an APP that is on the same level.

I don’t want to bad-mouth Proko, their offerings are stellar! Their perspective course developed with Marshall Vandruff is unique and in a league of their own, their caricature course using the Reilly method is unique, you won’t find it anywhere else, and it’s also in the top league. All their course are the best in the business, and many of their courses are unique and not to be found anywhere else. At the same time, I don’t want to lie and I hope they get the Zolly APP to the same level. It’s a good first stab at it.

The basic version is free, though, so there is nothing stopping you from giving it a spin.

But you are better of using the FREE 3D models on the Practice Drawing This website . They are currently better, and they are all free, and you don’t need to install an APP.

Artwod’s APP

Last-minute update: at this moment of writing, I would advise against joining ArtWod! The system is in turmoil as they move from a ‘Course’ model to a ‘Roadmap’ model. The website is in flux, and changes cause the system to lose some of your work and you have to redo some exercises. The system is buggy to the point where you can’t even access the Roadmap, the exercises, which is the whole point of joining.

The system is currently buggy and occasionally slow. They are releasing changes unannounced, at breakneck speed, without testing it properly first.

By joining, you are effectively paying to be allowed to be their beta tester. You’re funding the development of their system as it is being built. Like living in a house that is still being built.

I have no idea how long this turmoil will last, but right now, I would wait a bit until it becomes stable before joining.

I’m sorry, Antonio, I think Artwod is brilliant, but I can not endorse it in this state...

But I do think Artwod shows enormous potential and is worth keeping an eye on!

Artwod has a different approach to education and created a new product category all on its own!

Artwod works with “puzzles”, small bite-sized drawing exercises where you are asked to complete a drawing. This allows them to fine-tune the difficulty level of the exercises.

The puzzles are part of the so-called road maps where you have traditional art education videos explaining a concept, followed by puzzles that allow you to practice these new concepts.

They also have workouts which are chains of drawing exercises that go well together and where you get to practice what you learned during a Roadmap.

The Roadmaps work like this: they take you by the hand, and hand out small exercise by small exercise. You go to Artwod and you instantly have something to draw. The APP as an instant source of drawing reference. No need to think of what to draw, no need to look up drawing reference.

This is no small thing! It removes some of the friction to starting when you want to practice drawing. This is why I think the Artist APP is going to be a great ‘product category’.

And you can get feedback on your work in their system from very experienced art instructors. The feedback is stellar.

It is a subscription service, you pay a monthly or yearly fee.

They have their system working on their website. The course material is best done digitally. You download the puzzle, draw it digitally in for example ProCreate, then upload the result and continue on the roadmap.

But now Artwod came out with an APP! Similar to the Practice Drawing This Art Flashcards APP, it is not an actual APP you need to install. Rather, it runs inside a web page but has APP-like interactivity. It is rather clever, because this can improve the interaction design that much more: you can now do the puzzles by drawing digitally within their website, and upload it from there! Most students there work digitally anyway, and it just streamlines the process of doing drawing practice.

Caveat: at the time of writing, the digital drawing tool inside Artwod is not in a state yet where it is good enough to be a replacement for doing the drawing exercises either on paper or in dedicated digital drawing app. They released a first version, and drawing with it is cumbersome. But they are working on improving it! And I expect it to be good eventually.

Note that these are early days for the Artist APP.

I don’t think Artwod can be easily copied. The idea of Roadmaps and Puzzles is really clever, but it also requires a Herculean effort to create these. So much work went into these! If you want to compete with Artwod on the Roadmaps, you have to put in all that work just to have an equal offering, to begin with.

Combining that with the fact that the Roadmaps really work; eg. you can see on their Discord that students really get better, and the Roadmaps and puzzles are fun and just the right difficulty level, the rewards system addictive, and you realize that even though their Roadmaps are heavily in development still, Artwod shows great potential for the future.

Are We Competing?

I talked to a game developer a long time ago when I was working for a company that was contemplating making games for a platform that didn’t have games yet.

The guy was savvy. He explained to me that while he was working for a game dev company, and like us, they were also making games, he said that we weren’t competitors. The way he saw it, since there was nothing yet, the market was unsaturated, and if we did a good job, made a great game, people would get used to the idea of playing games on these devices and look around and find their games, too. If we advertised our game, we weren’t just advertising our game, we were advertising the entire product category, in effect advertising their product, too. Because this was a new product category, like the art education APPs that are now popping up are also a new product category.

In a saturated market, it is a zero-sum game. You either buy a perspective course on Proko, or you do it on another platform. One or the other.

But with a new product category, while it is true that if you use for example, say, the Artwod APP, and therefore not the Practice Drawing This Art Flashcards APP, if we both, and Proko’s Zolly , all three do a go a good job, the pie will become so much bigger that in absolute terms, each piece of the pie is much bigger than if we went it alone, if that makes sense.

If Proko does an amazing job with Zolly , they are effectively also promoting the entire product category of art education APPs and people might look around and find the Practice Drawing This Art Flashcards APP, and try it.

If Artwod does an amazing job with their app, the same is true.

With this market that is still unsaturated, the hope should be that all three should make the APPs as good as possible, because it then also becomes an advertisement for the entire product category, raising the boats for the other two apps also.

Other Alternatives

You can also still use the other alternatives that are out there. Pinterest is great for finding images to use for reference, and Sketchfab is great for 3D models. These two platforms have way more image reference resources, but you have to spend time looking for it. The benefits of the APPs discussed in this podcast is that they are optimized for that, for presenting you with just the right drawing reference image you need right now.

It’s an exciting time to see all of this happening, to be honest! I feel like I was just in time with this, entering this product category at ground level.

The Practice Drawing This Art Flashcards app was made public some time before Proko’s Zolly and the Artwod app were made public and I am really looking forward to seeing where they go with their APPs.

Links

My Art Flashcards , Proko's Zolly , Artwod , Pinterest , and Sketchfab

This Week

In staying with this week’s theme, here are some improvements I made to the art flashcards.

My wife told me she preferred dark mode on mobile phones. She said it’d look better in the YouTube videos. So I set about making a dark mode. Android phones work against you: the OS thinks it can do the color scheme for you, but it does a terrible job at it.

This is the result:

difference between light and dark mode on the mobile phone

I did a poll on YouTube: 45 percent preferred light mode, 55 percent preferred dark mode.

I also added a digital drawing tool to the flashcards page!

example use of digital drawing tool inside the art flashcards page

I took it for a spin. The verdict: drawing on a small phone screen is nowhere near as nice as drawing in a sketchbook. Still, can be handy when you’re in a situation where whipping out a sketchbook is not really an option. It probably works best for memory drawing so you don’t have to keep scrolling to the reference.

I had to get used to drawing on a small screen a bit, but with some practice, it started to become useful.

I hid it a bit, for now. You have to go into the About ... pane, and there is a link that enables it.

If you have a Samsung or iPad with a pen, give it a spin! It’s slightly different from what you’re used to, but it works if you get the hang of it. It’s optimized for sketching.

New Models

I don’t know how I could have missed the Brokendraw channel on YouTube. When it comes to explaining the Peter Han approach to approaching the Kim Jung Gi approach, I haven’t seen it explained better.

his 25 Essential Drawing Exercises are pure gold. He got the ideas for these exercises from several other places, and he credits them. I saw a few that originated with Peter Han’s dynamic sketching course, for example. I am working on expanding the warm-ups module in the art flashcards with some of these exercises as warm-ups, in a different order also here and there. But they are fantastic.

A few models inspired by his exerises. Click on the images to go to the models: