Domestika: Our Curated Directory

Premium creative courses from working illustrators and designers. The best of Domestika indexed.

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Introduction to Adobe Photoshop — Carles Marsal

This is Domestika’s single most-taken course on the entire platform, with nearly 382,000 students and a 100% positive rating across more than 10,000 reviews — a genuinely unusual level of consensus for any online course. Carles Marsal walks through Photoshop from a completely blank slate: layers, selection and masking tools, image transformation, brush customization, and portrait retouching with light and colour correction, building toward a finished personal project rather than isolated exercises. It is sold as part of a 5-course Domestika Basics bundle, so you get some adjacent material (like file management and export settings) alongside the core skills. There is no meaningful downside to recommending this one broadly — it is patient, thorough, and aimed squarely at people who have genuinely never opened Photoshop before.

Introduction to After Effects — Carlos “Zenzuke” Albarrán

With close to 300,000 students, this is the platform’s default entry point into motion graphics, and it earns that position by covering a genuinely wide arc: the core After Effects workflow and masking, working in 3D space with virtual cameras, shape and text animation, and post-production techniques like tracking and keying, before finishing on more advanced expressions and scripting. It is part of a 5-course bundle rather than a single standalone video, which explains the relatively long runtime. Reviews (nearly 4,932 of them, 97% positive) consistently note that it assumes zero prior animation experience but does expect basic comfort with design software already. Best suited to illustrators or designers who want to add movement to static work rather than absolute software beginners.

Professional Photography for Instagram — Mina Barrio

Short, focused, and built entirely around a smartphone rather than a dedicated camera, this course covers composition and lighting fundamentals for phone photography and then moves into editing workflows in Snapseed and VSCO to build a consistent visual style across a feed. With over 10,900 reviews at 99% positive and nearly 284,000 students, it is one of the platform’s most consistently well-reviewed shorter courses. Its narrowness is also its main limitation: if you already shoot on a proper camera and understand manual exposure, most of this will be familiar ground, and the value is specifically in the mobile-editing workflow rather than photography theory in general.

Drawing for Beginners Level -1 — Puño

The name is deliberately literal: this is pitched below “Level 1” for people who have never kept a sketchbook and feel intimidated by the idea of drawing at all. Puño runs through fundamental hand-drawing exercises — line control, proportion, shading — building toward a first completed sketchbook by the end rather than a single polished piece. It has drawn over 275,000 students and a 99% positive rating across more than 10,000 reviews, which suggests it succeeds at its narrow goal of making drawing feel approachable rather than technical. More experienced illustrators, or anyone who already draws casually, should skip straight past this one to a technique-specific course instead — it is not designed to teach anything beyond the basics.

Introduction to Adobe Illustrator — Aarón Martínez

The vector-graphics counterpart to the Photoshop course above, this covers the Illustrator fundamentals in real depth: shape tools and the Pathfinder panel, colour modes and gradients, typography basics, and file export and optimization for both print and web. It ships as a 6-course bundle totalling over 10 hours, considerably longer than most “introduction” courses on the platform, and reviewers (5,435 of them, 98% positive) generally describe it as genuinely comprehensive rather than a marketing-driven overview. Pairs naturally with the Photoshop course if the goal is a full raster-plus-vector Adobe foundation, and is a reasonable next step for anyone who has outgrown Canva or similar simplified tools.

Modern Watercolor Techniques — Ana Victoria Calderón

Domestika’s flagship traditional-art course, with 223,844 students and a 99% positive rating, this is aimed at illustrators and hobbyists who want to step away from a stylus and work with real paint. Ana Victoria Calderón covers colour mixing, wet-on-wet technique, and layering, building toward a complete personal watercolor piece from initial sketch through to finished artwork. The regular price is £37, but this specific course is one Domestika discounts unusually aggressively and unusually often — promotional pricing under £1 has been observed — so it is worth waiting for a sale notification rather than paying full price if timing is flexible. Recommended without reservation for anyone who wants a traditional-media alternative to the platform’s heavily digital-tools catalog.

Buying individual courses vs. Domestika Plus

Every course above can be bought individually at the prices listed, and you keep lifetime access to whatever you buy that way. Domestika also runs a subscription tier, Domestika Plus, priced at roughly £25/month or an introductory-year rate of about £131/year (the site’s own fine print notes this jumps to a full renewal rate near £262/year after the first year) — UK pricing was not directly shown on the fetched pages, so these are FX-converted from the displayed USD figures and should be confirmed at checkout. Plus gives access to 1,000+ courses on a rotating, time-limited basis (100+ added weekly) plus 12 annual credits, one per month, that you can redeem for any course to own permanently even after cancelling. For most people the maths favours Plus only if you genuinely plan to sample widely across categories; if you already know you want two or three of the specific courses above, buying them individually and keeping them forever works out similar in cost and is simpler to manage. All six courses above happen to be exactly the kind of high-enrollment, broadly useful titles that make sense to buy outright rather than rent through a subscription.