Guess what? You can now send DMs (Direct Messages) to other users on Proko.com!  We've heard your requests and we're excited to bring you this new feature. This is the perfect way to chat with other art students and your instructors, making it even easier to collaborate and learn together in real time. To start DMing, just click on the message bubble icon 🗨️ in the top right corner next to the shopping cart. Search for users you've connected with on Proko, send them a request, and once they accept, you're good to go! Heads up: This feature is still in beta testing, so we'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can make it even better. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please drop a comment in this community thread. Happy messaging, and as always, thanks for being a part of the Proko community! 

Any more Dark mode enjoyers out there?:)

Hi Proko team, first of all thanks so much to allow me to be part of the Proko 2.0 beta. To the point, for the ones that are halfway through the courses I thought it would be useful a "complete lesson" button such as in the Aron Blaise's tutorials website. It would add up in your completion percentage at your "courses" panel and give you a nice sense of achievement boost without having to rewatch lessons you have already done. Example: I'm currently doing Mannequinization assignments so I'd like to mark all the previous content of the figure course as "completed". I hope it's helpful, Tobey

Hey Beta Testers. We got more updates! ALBUMS - Finally you can control your albums. - Create new albums in My Classroom - Manage Images - delete or move images from one album to another by selecting an album in My Classroom and clicking 'manage images' - New image uploader when writing posts - Now when you upload images to a post, you can select which album to add them to. Or, you can attach images to a post that already exist in one of your albums. - Hidden Albums - in the settings of each album, you can make an album 'hidden'. This will hide it in your profile. This is useful when you want to add images to a post, but don't want those images to appear in your profile. Simply attach images to a post from a hidden album, or select a hidden album when uploading new images to a post. - Default album - One of your albums is the 'default'. This is the album images will automatically be uploaded to when uploading new images to a post, unless you select a different one. POST FROM NEWSFEED AND PROFILE - Now you can write a new post directly from your classroom newsfeed or from your profile. The "post to" setting is by default set to post to your profile, which means only your followers will get that post in their newsfeed. You can also change the "post to" to a lesson. A few of your recent lessons are shown in the dropdown, or you can search for any lesson. POSTS MENU - Updates to the 3 dots menu on every post. - Follow a user directly from this menu - Moderators have some new options Lots of bugs squished Load time optimizations

Loving the new website Proko team! It’s fun, engaging and socially driven. What else could we need? I think an app that would give us live notifications on comments, forum threads, new announcements and at mentions on the site would be great. It would make this experience that much more engaging and personal for each of us. And I think it would be a natural progression with the new more social dynamic of the website and overall proko community. all in favor, say “I”. Is this a good idea gang? Or am I a crazy man?

Hey Beta Testers, we deployed a big update today that included several suggestions from you. We also squashed many bugs (and as with any big update, we probably released some new bugs). Here's a list of some updates I thought you guys should know about: - Mark as completed button under each lesson. - Admins can bulk mark complete all lessons in a course part for those of you that finished watching a course on the old website. You can request this by email. - Allow Standalone lessons (not part of a course) to have 'completed' icon. - Allow ctrl + click on links throughout website. - In Browse courses, lessons and tools, we added a "Purchased" flag on items you have premium access to.  - In Browse Lessons page, can filter to show only FREE lessons. - In Community, if you click on a topic and then click back, it takes you back to the same spot you were before instead of to the top of the page. So, you don't have to scroll to find your place. Thank you all for the help so far! We're continuing to work on addressing more issues and developing more exciting features :)

Hey, guys! I've been using the beta site for a few months now and it's looking great overall, can't wait for it to be launched! Although, since I've been dealing with critiques so often, one thing I've had some difficulty with is that sometimes I just don't see all the posts marked with "ask for help". Would it be possible to maybe create a special section on the site which would show only the posts made with the "ask for help" checkbox marked so that anyone could easily access? Perhaps there could also be a green icon or badge that the users could check afterwards to indicate if any feedback was given to that post and/or if the user's question was answered - that way, anyone who would access the "help" section could prioritize replying to the unanswered posts. Another thing is that some people seem to be having trouble figuring out how to get help. @Steffen Anzivino recently made some comments on that - he said: --- "I have not yet posted for a critique on prokolab.com, after reading this, it will be on my mind. If you are having to remind people to check that box then maybe the box itself should be a little more of an eye grabber? or placed in front of the "Post" button. I don't know, just pondering. The critique is one of the things i look forward to the most in my courses. I'm glad I read your response, or i may have been posting help request to an open forum for a while! lol, so thanks for the info." --- Maybe this is something you've already been considering? Thanks! \o/

Based on your feedback, we decided to change the community categories to be theme-focused (painting, anatomy, concept design) instead of intent-focused (learn, teach, share). We did our best to migrate all your existing posts to the new categories. https://prokolab.com/community/categories One side effect is that now everyone's category subscriptions are reset. So, please go to the community page and "follow" the categories you're interested in to receive those posts in your newsfeed. Sometimes you'll run into the problem where your specific post can go into more than one category. It's impossible to make categories without any overlap. So in those situations, just pick the one that makes the most sense :) Hope this system is less confusing.

Hey, guys! As I'm exploring the site and looking for people's posts to give feedback, I was wondering if it would be possible to add a feature that could enable some kind of filter in my feed so I'd only see the "asked for help" posts. I suppose this might help a lot for people to critique and get critiqued, what do you think?

Hello Everyone Making Magic Here! I think we can all agree, it can be difficult to make real connections with other people online. This is mentioned from time to time on the podcasts. I think we can also agree that we are going through an extraordinary time in earth's history when being able to make supportive friendships online with fellow travelers might be more important than ever. With that in mind, I have a few questions. It looks like we don't have any kind of DM ability directly on the site. If someone wants to reach us, they have to go to our website, IG, or other SNS accounts. Is that right? Also wondering if there's a way someone can see when we've supported their post by upvoting it. Maybe we can't see upvoters and downvoters by design, to protect anonymity? I'm still kind of stuck in the mindset of using it like a 'like' to acknowledge that it's been seen. If I want someone to know I've supported something they've said, I have to take the time to comment. (Ordinarily, I would strategically go right to the thing I'm studying, do my work, and leave. However, since we have this special invitation, I'm trying to use the site in accordance with the picture in my mind from what I've heard on Draftsmen.) The third thing I'm wondering is if there will eventually be a way that we can form groups, or accountability partnerships with other members here on the platform. I'm incredibly blessed to have a few partnerships that I've had ongoing the past few years that have made all the difference for me and my partners. Thank you for reading and considering all of this. Other Beta Testers, what do you all think?

It seems there are a lot of us here that love books. Some of the books we all love are the kind of books you have to draw your way through, like Scott Robertson's books. If we had a category for it we can draw our way through books together as a community, or just discuss books that we all like.

Hey Beta Testers, we have a few updates worth mentioning: - Mobile website. We just launched the dedicated mobile version of the website. So, now it's much easier to navigate the site on a phone. It should load automatically on phones and tablets unless your browser is set to load the desktop version. Since we just launched it, there will most likely be some bugs. Please report them in this thread. - Push notification settings. Click on your avatar at the top right and select settings. Then click on the Notifications tab on the top. Here you can turn Push notifications from your browser on/off and control which things you get notified about. - Undo complete lesson. Many of you requested to be able to mark a lesson as NOT complete after we launched the feature to manually complete a lesson. Now you can complete and un-complete as you wish! - Sticky Header. Small feature, but it was requested. For convenience, the header will stay visible at the top even as you scroll down, so you can access the menu items quickly. Thank you for all your feedback everyone!!!

Hi there, thank you very much for inviting me as a beta tester! I really was waiting to visit Proko 2.0 and I must say, I'm very pleased with the result! :) You guys did a great job! The new look is very nice and the add of a community is really neat. I've done a quick tour, I intend to spend more time using the site but I'm a bit confused about some things. Also I thought we could use this thread to gather our thoughts about the website. (Please consider the following are just observations and personal taste, I know you just launched the site and you're still working on it, so if anything said here seems irrelevant just ignore it) So, that said, here are my two cents : 1) Regarding the lessons : I love the new feature allowing to request for help under each lesson. However, 3D models and ebooks are now buried among the videos. I think I liked it more on the old site, where I had a quick access to it. Maybe in a separate tab? 2) Forums : They look very clean and easy to use but regarding lessons, everything is stacked into the same category. Maybe it would be easier to navigate into separated sub-categories : gestures, figure drawing, anatomy, podcasts an so on. Again, you did an amazing work! I can't wait to use it more! Cheers

I personally have found the Discord community platform to be most functional for this application. Real time voice/video/sharing. REAL TIME! Voice! Video! Sharing! Great for the community in general but many uses become apparent such as classes and workshops... all under one platform!(PS Art-wod has successfully implemented its usage.) Thanks.

I love Proko's courses, so this isn't a criticism, but just a suggestion to help improve the site: I think the whole Proko experience would be improved if there was more community interaction by the Proko team. The reason I say this, is because I routinely check the community pages for Drawing Basics and for the Site Suggestions, etc and there's rarely any responses from Proko team members. Lots of questions asked but only occasional answers or responses. It feels sort of abandoned in a way. I feel like if there was more interaction/feedback from the Proko team to community questions, etc it would go a long way to improve the site and the community around it. There's a lot of feedback on social media from the Proko team, so I know they can do it, it just doesn't seem to extend as much to the native Proko site.

I'm not sure if this has been addressed in a livestream or elsewhere as I haven't had time to watch through everything but I'm worried about the apparent direction Proko seems to be taking. The thing I've always loved is that the content is free and open to everyone but the premium is there for extras and as a bonus. Now it feels as though the bulk of the content is gated off and has to be purchased and the free content, as substantial as it may be, is merely there to herd you towards making a purchase. From what I've seen so far the free lesson is usually a later chapter in the course which not only makes you want to continue but also makes you feel like you're already missing part of the puzzle which feels a bit manipulative. Again, if this has been addressed and the site will continue to operate as before with full free courses on the way and these new courses are the exception then please disregard but as the title says I'm worried.

Hi, I really like to take some time every day to draw or paint some scketches. Before the pandemic I used to personally go around armed with a camera to create my own reference gallery, so that I wouldn't get on rights violation even by accident, I had also planned a trip with some friends and colleagues to visit zoos and natural history museums around Europe when the pandemic broke out and Italy went into lockdown, since then the camera has been gathering dust. When I can I buy some reference packs from photographers or specialised sites but often the variety of subjects leaves something to be desired (especially when it comes to animals). I have a lot of photos that could maybe be useful to someone and I would be happy to share them with other students, free to use (after all I'm not a master of photography...) and I'm sure I'm not the only one who takes care of her own references and have some photos to share. It's possible to have a section where share our references, maybe also make request to other students? (Dunno "Hi, I need horses reference. Did someone have some to share?" <--- something like this)

If I am not mistaken, I remember that mentorship should be a big news about Proko 2.0. Is it already available and I am not seeing it? Is it this forum? Thank you!

I implemented this on my forum (back when I had a forum) and I used it all the time. A lot of other users did too. It was a hit and I think I have an explanation for why. In "Designing With the Mind in Mind", a book on the psychology of people when they are interacting with computers, it talks about how precious and limited a person's working memory is. Working memory, if you don't know, is basically all the things we are aware of at a given time. ( It doesn't quite mean the same thing as attention or short term memory, but if it's easier for you to think of it that way, you can.) Human working memory is like running a computer with only 100KB of RAM or something insanely small like that. It fills up very quickly and if it wants to add something else, it has to kick stuff out to make room. And like RAM, it's volatile. It's just electrical activity in the brain. Once the activity for something stops, it's gone. If it got saved to long term memory (much like a hard drive) it's possible for it to be retrieved later but still it is no longer readily available to the person. So how does this relate to quoting? Well over the years I've found that people are really bad at remembering what they said in posts and it's probably because by the time I respond, their working memory has long since moved on to thinking about other stuff. So if I want to go through their post and make comments on on specific parts, I quote exactly what I'm responding to so they can be reminded. Here's an example. Let's say Stan made a big post introducing us to his sock puppet collection. I read it and I have a few things to say. So I quote the relevant parts of Stan's post and put my comments below, like so: "This is Binky. He's my favorite because his eyes go in different directions." I agree, He's adorbs. "And then this one is a cactus, so I named him Mr. Cuddles." You should cuddle with him. "And I used to have one more sock puppet but I think my dryer ate him." Oh no! Let's organize a search party! Haha. See how I can be more immediate and conversational in my responses? I think this helps promote community because it bridges time and space. It makes it so you can react to stuff like it just happened. And yeah I could just, by hand, copy and paste what I want and manually put quotes around it. But having the feature built in has a few advantages: #1 The site can automatically format the quoted text to communicate that it's quoted text, not something you wrote yourself #2 That will also make it really easy to visually distinguish the quoted text from the original text in a post #3 It makes for a much better user experience especially on a phone where copying and pasting is tedious. And yeah, maybe not everybody would use this, but I think if a lot of people were using it, a lot of other people would see the value and start using it as well. Just my two cents.

The forum looks great and I'm really really excited to participate ! One thing I was wondering is - could you please make a " Sketchbook" sub-forum ? In the places I participated in the sketchbook section was always the most active place. because people use it to track their progress and to follow all the work of somebody they like etc. and its really fun and easy to communicate with peers about what they are up to, since all their work is at one place. Having sketchbooks is just insanely engaging - community wise. Other than that , this place is magical, i love it :)