Efficient Digital Painting with Athoro

Sign-ups open now!

In this new 8-week live digital painting class, Athoro builds the fundamentals of painting around a single framework: that painting is a drawing problem before it is a rendering problem. He will cover everything from how to understand your reference as 3D geometry, to calculating how light hits those forms, to making deliberate decisions about color and finally texture. Workflow, brushwork and texture will also be discussed.

The goal of this class is to make every concept feel like it makes sense. Not just memorized, but understood. The class is structured as a progressive “reduction system”. Early weeks work at maximum simplicity and complexity is added deliberately as the underlying logic of the concepts are developed. By the final weeks students are painting with a solid understanding of what they’re painting, rather than just copying shapes blindly trying to match color. With full color, texture, and photobashing workflows, using reference as a tool rather than a crutch.

Each session includes somewhat of a philosophy component, live demos using Blender and Photoshop, and a structured exercise. The class uses Blender as a recurring teaching tool to make internal calculations visible: students see the actual 3D geometry, lighting rigs, and material properties that underpin every painting decision.

We’ll Cover:

Week 01: The System Introduction to the art production chain: Form Coordination, Render Coordination, 2D Coordination, Marks. Students learn vocabulary as a diagnostic tool and reduction as the governing principle of the entire class.
Week 02: Form Understanding subjects as 3D geometry rather than fl at shapes. Covers the dimension hierarchy, form reduction from primitive to complex, and internal rotation as the test of true understanding
Week 03: Rendering, 2 Values and Graphic Shapes Render coordination at maximum reduction: 2 values, hard edges, no blending. Students learn that any reference can be broken down into 2 values, making for the best graphic readability.
Week 04: Workflow and Shape Design Expanding to 4+ values in greyscale while keeping hard graphic shapes. Shape design is treated as a drawing problem: every shape border is either describing form correctly or it is not.
Week 05: Edges and Texture Soft edges introduced alongside the hard edges from weeks 3 and 4. Texture is covered as a surface description tool, including noise texture as a replacement for smooth gradients.
Week 06: Color and Photobashing Color introduced as the final layer of render coordination via the HSV cylinder and layer mode workflows. Photobashing covered as a production tool that must stay subordinate to the underlying form and value structure.
Week 07: Structure and Reference Analysis Students learn to read a 2D reference as a “3D file”, extracting form geometry and light logic rather than copying shapes. Painting from imagination is introduced as the natural output of accumulated internal understanding.
Week 08: Full Chain: Imagination and Tools Students paint from imagination using every tool from the 8 weeks simultaneously. Reference is used to confirm internal calculations, not to copy.

Duration: 8 weeks
Date & Time: Saturdays at 12PM ET starting July 25, 2026
Skill level: All skill levels welcome
Tiers: 12 Critique spots – Receive feedback or spectate without homework feedback
Format: 4-5 hour live class with combination of lectures, demos, and feedback. Recordings will be provided within ~2 days of each class.
Materials: Any digital or traditional mediums. Paintovers will be done digitally.