Hi, I’m Phil, the founder of theartdude.com. I’m an artist. I’m also a former art student and a current art school teacher. I love making art and I love helping people who want to make art.

I started this blog to share my experiences with you, so that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid the pitfalls that I fell into.

Art is hard to get into. Art school is hard to pay for. And starting your life as an artist is risky, even if you go to art school.

But it’s worth it! There’s nothing better than being able to wake up every morning and do what you love.*

This is the blog where I talk about how to get good at drawing, painting or sculpting, or whatever your preferred medium may be.

I also want to help people who are interested in going to college for art find the best way of paying for it and getting the most out of it.*

Take a look around and see if anything here interests you. If so, please sign up for email updates at the bottom of this page (where it says “Get Email Updates”). It’ll help me know who my audience is and what they’re interested in hearing about.*

Thanks

I’m not sure if this is going to end up being a furry blog, or an art blog, or what. I’m probably going to talk about the two a lot together, because that’s why I’m paying so much attention to it right now.

Thing is, there are a lot of benefits to art school, but they’re hard to see unless you’ve been through it. There are a lot of different opinions out there on art school, and they tend to be pretty negative. Which isn’t surprising, really; art isn’t something most people understand. So people who don’t understand end up judging it based on things like “well, it doesn’t seem like it leads anywhere” and “it costs too much money”, which are at best only tangentially related to the art itself.

Art school is expensive. It costs more than most other majors (unless you go for fashion design). But that’s because it’s a four-year bachelor degree (or five years), plus another one (or two). The price has more to do with the degree than the program – you can get an art degree from any number of cheaper schools. Art school is also time-consuming: you will be doing mostly art for three hours of every day for at

The most difficult thing about getting an art degree is paying for it. Students typically take out loans to pay for their education. In some cases, these can be very large loans, since a typical art degree program costs around $30,000 per year. If you do not have the money to pay for your education, you should consider applying for scholarships and grants.

Payment for Art Students!

If you’re an art student and want to earn money while making furry art, I’m offering a bi-monthly paid commission. I will pay $250 in exchange for your work. If you are accepted into the program, you will be required to make at least one piece of furry art per month, each piece worth at least $50.

How do you apply?

You may submit up to three pieces of furry artwork of any style or media. All submissions must be in digital format, sent via e-mail to [email protected] . Digital images can be submitted as either a link to an image file hosted elsewhere (I don’t accept files uploaded to tumblr), or as a .zip folder containing all the images as separate files. The subject line of your e-mail should read “Bi-Monthly Commission Application.” Please include your name, the title of each piece, and your email address in the body of the e-mail.

All pieces must be your own work, and original; no fanart or trace images will be accepted. This offer is open only to students currently enrolled in art school. Your submission(s) must have been made within the past two years. 

My decision about

As I get older, I am finding that I enjoy art more and more. When I was younger, it seemed like something that was just for people who didn’t know how to do anything else with their lives. But the older I get, the more I find that art is freeing in ways that you can’t imagine before you start doing it.

Trying to put into words why art is so important to me is hard, but as I try to think about it, there are a few things that spring to mind. The first is the amount of time I spend on it. If you told me a year ago that my grades would suffer and my social life would be nonexistent due to a hobby, I would have thought you were crazy, but here we are. The second thing that comes to mind is how much work goes into producing art of any kind. It takes dedication and passion to make something out of nothing; even if your end product isn’t perfect, it shows that you cared enough to try. And lastly, there’s the money aspect. It might sound silly, but when I started getting paid for my art (and commissions) it felt like everything was coming together for me as an artist.

I hope you like some of my most recent work