Can you get an education in art for free?

Like most artists around here, I’ve got a bunch of links stored up from my travels around the Internet. Art tutorials of every shape and size, telling me everything from how to compose color to how to wrap brushes so they stay nice. This is truly a wonderful time to be an artist.

A while ago, I posed a question to myself: Just how much art education could person get strictly from online resources? Looking at the links I have collected, and knowing that there is a vast number of them that I have yet to find, I’m beginning to wonder if a person could get a “complete” art education just by learning online.

Now, naturally no amount of tutorial-reading will lead to the skill required to paint and draw expertly. Practice and a good art teacher will get you there much faster, in my opinion.

The biggest problem I see to learning online, though, is its uniformity. Tutorials and information are scattered, not held to similar quality standards, and not categorized or organized in a way that lets a beginner know where to start.

So, we need a social art-links website?

I think this would be a great way to help art students who either can’t afford to go to collage, wish to add to their studies, or simply don’t feel that traditional art education works for them to have an organized way to study the arts.

Here’s what I think such a website would need:

• A method to add links without creating duplicates
• Ways categorize links according to subject
• A way to arrange links in the best order for them to be done (from beginner to advanced)

I’ve heard that WordPress may work as a basic platform for this to be done.

Now obviously it’s harder to get one-on-one critiques on the Internet, but I think with a proper forum setup it might be possible to make up for this to an extent.

If anyone has any input, or knows of another project that is doing this, please leave a comment below!

…my current links on del.icio.us