Adobe After Effects: The Complete Beginner Course (All Versions) vs The Art & Science of Drawing

The course delivers a complete beginner arc across roughly 22 lessons and about four hours of video: the After Effects interface, compositions, layers, keyframes and animation basics, masking, effects, and a capstone "Morph" visual-effects project. Class Central's listing carries a 4.7 rating across 20 Skillshare ratings, and the cross-listed Udemy edition holds 4.3/5 from 265 reviews — consistent signals that the curriculum is accurate and well-scoped for absolute beginners. Reviewers on CourseDuck repeatedly describe it as "great beginners course with plenty of exercises" and praise its clear, project-based structure. The main content limitation, named by multiple learners, is that it stops at the beginner ceiling: students like David Sadleir and Paw Pedersen explicitly asked for an intermediate follow-up because the class ends just as they wanted to go deeper.

Tobias of Surfaced Studio is the standout dimension. He has produced After Effects and VFX "edutainment" for over a decade, with a YouTube following north of 300,000 subscribers, and his teaching philosophy is that training should be both educational and entertaining. CourseDuck reviewer John Nelson calls him "a highly entertaining and knowledgeable instructor," and Gordon Riley goes further: "Hands down the best instructor for After Effects and Adobe Premiere, and this course is no exception." Review blogs single out his explanations as "the most articulate, funniest, and most clearly presented" in the After Effects space. He focuses on teaching not just which button to press but why a given tool fits a given task — the mark of an instructor building transferable intuition rather than recipe-following.

On Skillshare the class is covered by the standard subscription (around $14/month or ~$168/year, frequently discounted, with a free trial), which gives access not only to this course but to Surfaced Studio's other classes and the entire Skillshare catalog. For a learner who wants a single, well-produced four-hour foundation before branching into the platform's thousands of motion and design classes, that is strong value. The same course also exists on Udemy as a paid one-time purchase and free on Surfaced Studio's own academy, so price-sensitive learners have options — but inside the Skillshare subscription model the cost-per-hour of instruction here is genuinely low.

The course is explicitly project-based: every section builds toward the hands-on Morph VFX final project, and CourseDuck reviewers note it comes "with plenty of exercises." Beginner Dorian Lambert, with no prior video editing experience, reported following along and "made the Morph effect with ease," which is exactly the outcome a project-based beginner course should produce. The limitation is breadth: it is a focused four-hour class with one capstone, not a sprawling library of drills. Learners who want dozens of standalone exercises or repeated practice projects will finish this and immediately want more — which is why so many reviews end with a request for an intermediate sequel.

For a skills course, the relevant "outcome" is confidence and capability, and the review record is strong here. Reviewer Melissa described After Effects as initially "very daunting and difficult" and credited the course with making her "completely comfortable with After Effects." Hadeel Abobakr Baazim called it "a very useful course that made me very comfortable with adobe after effect," and absolute beginners with no editing background report completing the capstone successfully. The consistency of "went from intimidated to comfortable in four hours" across independent reviewers is the clearest evidence the course reliably moves true beginners to a functional baseline.

A genuinely systematic fundamentals curriculum — mark-making, measuring, proportion, 3D form, contour, and light-and-shadow — taught one skill at a time with clear demonstrations. Reviewers repeatedly call it the clearest beginner drawing instruction they have found. Capped only because it is deliberately foundational: no advanced rendering or stylistic range.

Eviston is the standout. Across our sample he is described as thorough, clear and easy to follow, and a Hacker News user recommended his series "without reservation". Twenty-plus years of studio and academy teaching show in the structured, one-skill-per-lesson pacing.

Included in the Skillshare subscription (~$14/month). The full multi-class Art & Science of Drawing path — basic skills through shading — sits inside one subscription, so a learner who works the sequence over a month or two gets an entire foundations program for the price of one month of access.

Every lesson ends with a concrete practice project, and the Skillshare projects tab carries thousands of student submissions. Learners report visible week-one improvement. Capped because the projects are skill-building drills, not a portfolio-grade body of finished work, and peer feedback is light.

The fundamentals — observation, proportion, constructing 3D form, controlling value — transfer directly to illustration, design and any subsequent drawing study. Reviewers note the skills make it easier to pick up later, more specialised classes. Limit is scope: it teaches the foundation, not a finished professional specialism.