Contemplanda
Contemplanda course syllabus
Digital Art
A Contemplanda online course.
Digital Art follows the path from a first pencil drawing to finished digital color. The first semester opens on paper with drawing fundamentals (line quality and line weight, simple shapes, gesture, construction from basic forms, and perspective) and then value: seeing and grouping values, shading, and lost and found edges. The semester closes in Clip Studio Paint, where students prepare scanned line art, make selections, flat colors, and keep an organized layer stack.
The second semester works in Clip Studio Paint throughout. It studies light and shadow on simple forms, cast shadows, highlights, and how different surfaces take light, then turns to color for story and carries a piece through its rendering pass to a print-ready file. The video lessons come from public series by Proko, Sycra, Marco Bucci, and the comic colorist Kurt Michael Russell. Paper exercises are handed in as photos or scans and digital ones as layered files, and every lesson closes with a short check on an idea from its videos.
Course at a glance
- Course title
- Digital Art
- Publisher
- Contemplanda
- Structure
- 6 units over two semesters
- Lessons
- 34 lessons
- Credit
- Not awarded by Contemplanda
- Enrollment
- Purchasing is not open yet
- Course page
- www.contemplanda.com/courses/digital-art
Credit and enrollment
Contemplanda does not award high school credit. A student who wants credit for the course should ask their own school whether it will accept it.
Purchasing is not open yet. Questions about enrolling can go to info@contemplanda.com.
Students who are already enrolled sign in at direct.contemplanda.com.
How the course works
- Every lesson has embedded videos, from 1 to 7 a lesson.
Units and lessons
Every published lesson, by semester and unit.
Semester 1
Drawing and lineart fundamentals
- Learning to draw
- Lines and line quality
- Line weight
- Simple shapes and shape language
- Proportion and gesture
- Thinking in 3D
- Perspective basics
- Perspective in practice
- Drawing from memory and imagination
Value and edges
- Seeing and organizing values
- Shading with value groups
- Sharp, firm, soft and lost edges
Clip Studio Paint essentials
- The Clip Studio Paint workspace
- Preparing line art
- Selections and fills
- Flats and flatting
- Layers, adjustments and actions
Semester 2
Light and shadow
- Planes and the terminator
- Lighting and rendering a sphere
- Constructing cast shadows
- Value, color and surface
- Direct light for digital colorists
- Indirect light and the lighting exercise
- Where highlights go
- Light, shadow and color in painting
Narrative production
- Choosing colors with contrast
- Focus and readability
- Mood and local color
- Color theory in depth
Portfolio and finishing
- Rendering shadows
- Highlights and secondary light
- Edges and texture
- Lighting form and common problems
- Exporting the finished piece
Assessment
Every lesson has one question that is graded automatically, and each answer counts toward the student's mastery record, which shows each skill as attempted, familiar, proficient, or mastered.
Contemplanda publishes no grade weighting for this course. A school that decides to grant credit for it also decides how the work counts toward a grade.
Academic integrity
Work in the course must be the student's own.
AI image generation is not used in the course and is not accepted in submitted work.
Answer keys for graded questions are never sent to the student's device.
Materials and technology
- Where the course runs
- In a web browser, through Contemplanda Direct
- Software
- Clip Studio Paint, or Photoshop
- Textbook
- None required. The course's own lessons are the text.