Meet Stan Prokopenko

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stan Prokopenko. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stan below.

Stan, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
To me, keeping my creativity alive isn’t just about drawing and painting, but in how I approach problem solving in my business and use technology. For me, it’s all about continuous learning, exploring new territories, thinking outside the box, and embracing challenges across the board. I try to structure my workdays to spend most of my time on creative tasks and minimize everything else. Building technical skills is key, whether that’s mastering the basics of drawing, understanding the ins and outs of digital tools, learning a new coding language, or exploring business strategies. This foundation lets me innovate and express my ideas effectively.

Community and feedback play a big role in this journey, too. Engaging with a network of creative professionals, sharing insights, and being open to feedback helps me gain new perspectives and keeps me motivated to innovate and improve. Engaging with other creators, sharing my work, and being open to constructive criticism can provide new insights and motivation to keep improving and trying new things.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
My name is Stan Prokopenko. I am an artist, as well as the founder and CEO of Proko, an online art education platform that produces high quality courses for artists of all skill levels. Our content is fun and light hearted, making the learning process enjoyable. Last year we launched my Drawing Basics course for beginners just getting started and intermediate artists that want to tune up their fundamentals. It quickly became out most successful course yet. We partnered with Marvel to produce “Marvel’s the Art of Storytelling”. That was a huge accomplishment for us, not only to be validated by a giant like Marvel, but also to branch out into comics. In the past few years, we’ve added a lot of courses created by other artists, the most recent being “Introduction to Figure Construction” by Steven Hampton. Being able to give other artists a platform for their courses has been really rewarding for us, but also expands the scope of what our students can learn on the site. This year we are working on finishing our “Digital Painting Fundamentals” course with a team of skilled digital painters, and releasing the long awaited Perspective course by the one and only Marshall Vandruff.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Passing on this question.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
Our number one obstacle on the horizon is staying competitive and relevant with the fast approaching AI. Technology is moving faster than ever and keeping up can feel daunting. Many artists in the industry are pessimistic in what’s coming and many young students are not sure what career paths are safe. We also don’t know what the online education space will look like in 5 – 10 years. So, we have to ask ourselves how can we stay true to what we are doing here at Proko, but stay flexible enough to adapt and use these new technologies to our benefit. Ignoring the inevitable benefits no one. I have personally been working on creating tools that help our small team be more efficient. Taking the mundane work and automating it to allows the team to be more creative and impactful with their time. This has helped us get through out large backlog of videos that were recorded but not yet edited.

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