New Masters Academy is an online art education platform that aims to provide high quality content at a low monthly cost. The focus of NMA is on art fundamentals, particularly drawing and painting, with an emphasis on the figure.
What initially convinced me to sign up for a subscription to New Masters Academy was the impressive roster of artistic talent they have. Glenn Vilppu, Steve Huston, Bill Perkins, Joe Weatherly, Gary Meyer and several others have contributed and the list continues to grow.
NMA is essentially an online collection of art workshops with subjects ranging from composition, drawing, painting, anatomy, and sculpture. This format is the cause of both the site’s strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand you have access to tons of high quality content taught by first class artists on a multitude of different subjects. On the other hand if you jump between instructors and lessons you’ll get contradictory solutions to the same problems and ultimately end up confused, especially if you’re a beginner. In any art form there are multiple ways to achieve similar results and not all of those ways will be compatible with one another. Frazetta didn’t paint like Rockwell, who didn’t paint like Gérôme, who didn’t paint like Sargent, who didn’t paint like Rembrandt and so on. If you’re starting from scratch it helps to have some guidance on what to study and how best to study, and NMA isn’t in the business of doing that.
For this reason I think those who will most benefit from a subscription to the site are intermediate to advanced artists who want to improve specific skills. If you have a solid foundation in the fundamentals seeing how different artists work will be helpful and inspirational. If you’re fresh off of reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain I’d suggest looking elsewhere. Update: NMA is now offering a new Beginner Program which teaches the fundamentals in a guided series. It starts with drawing materials and setup, basic drawing principles, and then begins moving into subjects such as cast and landscape drawing.
For those artists who are intermediate to advanced, the New Masters Academy is an excellent resource. They provide an extensive catalog of video lessons, reference photos, timed figure drawing videos and access to their community via the forum, social media and online chat. There’s also a subscription option that will give you access to additional 3D reference models.
My only complaint with the video lessons is that they don’t come with any type of assignments. This is my complaint with a lot of online art videos as a matter of fact. Drawing and painting demonstrations are nice and watching them can lead to fresh ideas and inspiration, but without having any sort of structured practical application their efficacy is greatly diminished. Recent additions, such as Steve Huston’s series of head drawing lessons, have added drawing assignments, which are followed by videos of Huston’s approach. I think this is a good start and I hope NMA continues to add more content like this Update: Many of the lessons that have been released on NMA since I originally wrote this review now have assignments. They’ve also added coaching plans where you receive a personalized learning plan and feedback from an instructor among other things.
Conclusion
It’d be hard for me not to recommend New Masters Academy. The content is excellent (if not perfect) and membership is very affordable. Just keep in mind the above caveats before signing up. Also if you’re not sure about whether or not NMA is a good fit for you, check out the free content on their Youtube page.
Visit New Masters Academy at www.newmastersacademy.org
Did you like this review or have suggestions? Comment below or send me an email.
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This is Joshua Jacobo, cofounder of New Masters Academy. We appreciate reviews like this since they help us improve our service.
A couple of notes:
1. We agree that assignments are important and we have actually added them in our recent lessons. Take a look if you haven’t already.
2. There’s a new version of the NMA web site that is currently in development that I think you’ll appreciate. We have lesson paths, playlist, notes, improved video playback, forums and much more. This will hopefully help new users navigate their way around the large amount of content.
3. I agree that we need more “absolutely beginner” content. We need more lessons that take someone who has decided that they want to learn how to draw/paint/sculpt and ease them into the process. We have plans to do more of this in the future.
4. As you’ve noticed, New Masters Academy is unlike an atelier where every student moves in a logical, step-by-step way from cast drawings, to life drawing etc. Those kinds of schools are generally top-down where there is an experienced artist at the top of a pyramid with content flowing downwards and other instructors working within that framework. The advantage of the atelier structure is that students know exactly what is expected of them and it’s clear what the “official” materials and approaches are. The disadvantage of this format though, is that it does not teach students how to apply the fundamentals in their own way. Often students who do these 40 hour sight-size drawings are patently unable to sketch or draw from imagination. The work ends up looking like poor copies of their instructor or even good copies. This is a challenge that we were aware of before we begun work on NMA. Our approach was to find as many of the living master artists as possible and get them to teach the foundations of art as they see them. As you’ve noticed these artists have their own approaches which can seem to contradict one another. We’ve thought long and hard about this and currently we remain where we started. Of course we’re open to suggestions on this but our feeling is that art isn’t a simple step-by-step process. All artists to some degree have to learn from different influences and pick and choose the approaches and styles that work best for them. We feel that forcing a curriculum in the way that some of these schools do will actually limit the educational value of the content. This is definitely a challenge that continues to engage us and as you’ve pointed out it’s both a strength and a weakness. At it’s core we see the questions as: is it better to try to make learning art easier truer? We’ll continue to try to find that balance.
Again, we appreciate the thoughtfulness of this article although it was obviously not created for our benefit. We will continue to try to improve our Web site and remain open to constructive criticism.
Joshua Jacobo
New Masters Academy
Thanks for your comment Joshua. I’m excited to hear about the updates you’re bringing to NMA and look forward to seeing them and seeing how the site develops in the future.
If they provide mentoring along with their tutorials,they’ll be the bestest of best……..
That might be what they’re aiming for with Art Mentors.
I like the New Master Academy it is one of the best I have found online even better then some Art classes that I have attended in person. I can play the video instructions back as many times as I like. I just wish there was some way that they could critique my work.
Agreed about the importance of assignments or exercises in general. It is one thing to watch or view an art video, but quite another to learn and able to replicate what one sees for a learning student. To draw and to teach are difference skills.
The account links ‘cancel subscription renewal’ and ‘change monthly plan’ actually bring you to a zendesk support ticket page where you have to write in and wait for a response back. (The same page as every other support ticket complaint.) So the ‘cancel any time’ policy is actually, ‘cancel within 48 hours, when we get back to you’. That’s an important difference compared to automatic cancellation.
Good to know.
I tried New Masters Academy for two months and your review is very accurate. None of these enhancements announced by the cofounder have yet to be implemented as far as I can tell. It is basically a database of workshop videos. What leaves me jittery about renewing for a year is the whole subscription process. It is very messy and confusing especially with a telephone number which only takes messages that are never returned and a slow response email help desk service. I just have no idea who I’m dealing with. If the company wants subscribers to fork out yearly subscription dollars they have to provide more secure and reliable support.
Agreed. I recently signed up again for the ten day trial they were running to see if there were any major updates. Before the end of the ten days I requested a cancellation and didn’t receive a reply until after I had been charged for the next month. I replied asking for a refund but got no response. (Update: I got a response and a refund, it just took over two weeks)
NMA has great content. They just need to figure out a better way of delivering it.
I have been using NMA for a few days now and love it. Whilst I agree a schedule would have helped, I spent some time viewing the lectures, decided which ones I liked then followed their work. Each has assignments and it works well for me. I am not experienced, but didn’t expect it to be like a course at college. To me that is the beauty of it. I can pick tutors I like from a good varied selection.
Thanks Vicky. NMA is good as it is. With a few tweaks I think it could be great.
My main concern is the slow response to either phone or e-mail
Moises
I recently joined NMA and I had a question regarding their certification program, so I called them and asked to speak to someone who could answer my question. The girl who answered my call was very professional, and after a few seconds of being on hold, she came back and took my contact info and assured me that someone would be in contact with me. Cordial as she was, there was something “not right” about that whole interaction, as I had a feeling I would not be hearing from anyone any time soon. Sure enough, no response as of yet. With that, I got online to see if others have experienced the same lack of response. Seeing menmo14’s comment above leaves me hoping that I don’t regret joining NMA.
Update on 06/21/17: my concern about the lack of response from NMA has been unwarranted. After making another effort to contact them, they responded very quickly, and they’ve been very helpful with answering all my questions. So far, I’m a happy camper.
I know that they’ve been working on a new version of the website. That may be causing the delayed response time.
I took two free classes from NMA. I have never attended art school, but I am passionate about drawing. I am not a beginer, but I need improvement, and I do welcome the intense type of teaching provided by NMA, which doesn’t harp on the basics. The internet is full of good demos for beginers. I, for one, love to spend THREE hours on the construction of the head with in depth analysis of old masters. I am seriously considering buying a membership.
Trying to cancel after my month’s subscription is up has been frustrating–after submitting the online cancelation form in advance of the deadline I was nevertheless charged for another month. Sending emails to three different NMA people/addresses, as well as calling them has been a dead-end as well. I am hoping to hear from someone, somehow, so I can arrange for a refund from them.
I’ve had this problem with them in the past: they seem to be spending a lot of time adding classes and instructors and images, which are very good, and not NEARLY enough time and energy to create a decent way to allow subscribers to communicate and receive responses in a timely manner. There is really no excuse for any site to be this bad at customer support.
This is unfortunate and I’ve had similar problems in the past. I thought they they might have a new attitude toward customer support but apparently they do not. There is no excuse for not having a method that allows customers to automatically cancel their subscription without human intervention. The only reason not to have such a process is that NMA does not want it. Given such a situation, I would use a temporary card number that expires within a few days so that automatic credit card charges would be essentially disabled. A bit of a nuisance much much less than what you are going through. It’s really unfortunate that what should be such an enjoyable and nothing experience turns out to be so frustrating. I hope your credit card company can help you. Just send them evidence that you attempted to cancel and NMA refused.
What I love about NMA is precisely the variety of approachs. I don’t see that as a flaw, but precisely as a wonderful opportunity of widen my horizon, get surprised, challenged, pushed out of my comfort zone, which I believe is the best way to improve. That said, the core teaching is not for beginners. But there is plenty for beginners classes (almost exclusively so, actually) on the internet, and there should be room for more advanced students, who know the basics. And I LOVE that NMA provides exactly that. Even if the course on perspective sometimes goes above my head, I love it. I just play the video a few times until I get it. I see no fault in NMA for anyone who wants to improve the skills for which they have classes. My only reservation is that it has no watercolor classes of the caliber of the oil classes. Watercolor is my medium of choice. I am also a student of sequential art (comics), and although NMA had been giving an amazing training in figure drawing, perfective, color, value, and composition, all very relevant to comics, sequential art is an art of its own, with its specific set of rules and challenges. But NMA has no sequential artist on staff. (Illustration is very different from comics.)