CG Cookie Grease Pencil courses for Blender 4.02

I produced DRAW! for CG Cookie back in 2024. A beginner course to get people started with Grease Pencil. It was released free, with follow-up courses building on the fundamentals covered. Grease Pencil then got a major glow-up soon after, making many of the tools covered a little outdated, but the core fundamentals are still pretty solid!

The follow-up courses were not free, but followed on from the basics learned in this course. I began with Concept – a course where I outlined my process for creating a character concept sheet for approval. This tied into Wayne Dixon’s course, RIG. We’d come up with Luna together. We wanted something partly robotic, female, and with space buns.

The second tie-in course was TURNAROUND which focused on creating a functional turn-around sheet for Luna to pass onto a 3D modeller. It would include all the details of the character necessary to produce the final model.

These courses were consistent with Grease Pencil until version 4.2 LTS. When 4.3 dropped, Grease Pencil got its majoy overhaul which fundamentally changed some key tools. The above courses were still useful and could be followed, but some workflows – especially with brush creation and saving of custom brushes – had been moved to a more universal asset system.

I attempted to cover some of these changes as soon as they dropped. You can see the major changes here:

Keeping up with the changes is both a blessing and a curse. It is great that software like Blender consistently improves its toolset, but making evergreen material is really difficult if you’re trying to keep up with those changes.