Is the Mastery Program Worth It? What We Can Prove, and What We Can't
We're the ones selling it, so this page sticks to things you can check and says plainly where the evidence runs out.
We sell this program, so treat everything below with the suspicion that deserves. I’ve stuck to things you can go and check yourself, and I’ve marked where our evidence stops.
What do you get for the money?
Lifetime access to the lessons. Two years of group coaching, included on every plan: weekly Zoom calls, plus written feedback from a coach on every piece you post, usually within 24 hours. The student community in the Milan Art app. The art business training. And the bonus courses.
The coaching is what makes this different from a video library, and it’s the thing most likely to justify the price for you. Somebody who paints professionally looks at what you made and tells you why the values are muddy. A playlist can’t do that.
It’s $3,999 paid once, $399 a month for twelve months, or $229 a month for twenty-four. The full cost breakdown has every total and the refund terms.
What do the reviews and numbers say?
In September 2026 Trustpilot rated us 4.7 from 573 reviews. The spread is 86% five star, 7% four, 2% three, 2% two, 3% one. The distribution tells you more than the average does, because an average hides the 3%.
When we read the forty negative and middling reviews in August, eight were about the teaching. The rest were about delivery, access or price, and most of those concerned our cheap entry classes rather than the Mastery Program itself. That’s useful in both directions: our customer service has been the weak point more often than our curriculum.
The community is active in a way you can measure. In roughly twelve months, students posted 49,589 times in the three coaching spaces that only enrolled students can enter. Across all of that, 1.5% of posts mention being stuck, 1.0% mention frustration, and 0.6% use language about quitting. I find those low numbers more reassuring than any testimonial.
One more that surprised me. Business and marketing talk rises from 0.3% of posts in Part 1 to 5.2% in Part 3, with gallery and selling conversation rising alongside it. People reach the business half and use it.
More than 9,000 artists have joined. I’m using the word joined on purpose, and the next section explains why.
What can’t we prove?
We don’t know our completion rate. Our systems record when somebody starts and carry no signal for when they finish. We could pick a proxy and quote it, and the two internal proxies we have disagree with each other, which is exactly why we won’t. We’ve built a graduate outcomes survey to answer this properly, and it hasn’t gone out yet.
We don’t publish income claims. The survey data we have was collected with a question too loose to support the claim people want to make from it, so we’re asking it again properly. Until that comes back, anyone quoting you a percentage of art students who make money, ours included, is working from something shakier than it sounds.
We don’t publish a weekly time commitment, because we’ve never measured one. The program is designed to take about a year, and most people land somewhere between twelve and twenty-four months at their own pace.
That’s three gaps on a page arguing you should spend $3,999, and you deserve to see them before you pay rather than after.
Who is it wrong for?
If you need deadlines to get anything done, this will fight you. It’s self-paced, nobody is waiting on your assignment, and the freedom that sells the program is the same freedom that strands people in section four for eight months.
If you already have a distinctive style you’re protecting, be careful. A recurring criticism in public reviews is that student paintings start to resemble the founders’. Part 2 is built to push against that, and you should still look at graduate paintings before you buy and decide whether you see a house style.
If you need every lesson available the day you enroll, know that Parts 1 and 2 are complete and Part 3, the business section, is still being added to the app. Most students reach Part 3 months after they start.
If the price only works on the longest payment plan, the two year plan totals $5,496, and supplies and any personal mentoring sit on top of that.
So is it worth it?
I can prove what you get. I can’t prove what you’ll achieve, and nobody selling an art education can, whatever their landing page says.
Here’s what I’d point at instead. Two years of a working artist looking at your paintings is a lot of expert attention, and attention is the scarce thing in learning to paint. A full third of the program, Part 3, is about pricing, commissions, prints and selling, which most art training skips entirely. And of the people who came to us through our own quiz, 49.8% named marketing and selling as their single biggest challenge, against 17.2% who named technical skills. That gap is the reason the business section exists.
It’s also cheaper than it was. In 2023 the program was $2,040 and feedback cost $99 a month separately, so the same package with two years of feedback came to $4,416, against $3,999 today.
If you want a hobby you enjoy on Sunday afternoons, this is more program than you need, and you should keep your money. If you want paintings in a style people recognize as yours, and a way to sell them, this is what we built for that.
If you’d like to test the teaching first, here’s the order we’d recommend starting in.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Mastery Program's completion rate?
We don't publish one, because we don't have one. Our systems record when someone starts and carry no signal for when they finish, so any number we gave you would be a guess dressed as a statistic. We've built a graduate outcomes survey to fix that and it hasn't gone out yet. Treat any art program quoting you a precise completion rate with the same suspicion you should treat us if we start.
What do the reviews actually say?
In September 2026 Trustpilot rated us 4.7 from 573 reviews. The distribution is 86% five star, 7% four, 2% three, 2% two and 3% one. When we read the forty negative and middling reviews in August 2026, eight were about the teaching itself; the rest concerned delivery, access or price, and they clustered on our low-cost entry classes rather than the Mastery Program.
Is this program for beginners?
Yes, and most people who arrive already paint. Of 1,589 people who took our pre-enrollment quiz, 17.1% called themselves beginners, 44.7% intermediate, 26.5% experienced and 11.7% professional. You don't need prior experience or a portfolio. It starts from pencil and contour drawing, so a beginner isn't lost, as long as you follow the lessons in order.
How long does it take?
It's self-paced. The program is designed to be completed in about a year and our own comparison table gives a range of twelve to twenty-four months. We've never measured how long students actually take, and we don't publish a weekly hours requirement, so treat any number you see as someone's estimate rather than ours.
What's the most common reason people don't finish?
Self-paced means nobody chases you. There are no deadlines and no cohort moving without you, which suits some people and slowly defeats others. The built-in answer is the weekly coaching call, where you can bring a stall and get help with it. A one to one mentor is the other, at $200 a month on top. We haven't measured whether a mentor makes finishing more likely, so treat that as a reasonable guess rather than a finding.
Will my art end up looking like Elli Milan's?
That's a real criticism in public reviews and it deserves a straight answer. You're learning from working artists with a strong look, and the second part of the program exists to move you off theirs and onto your own: each section pairs a new medium with work on your own style, and it ends with you writing a style recipe and painting a series in it. Before you buy, look at graduate paintings and judge for yourself whether they look like a house style or like a room full of different artists.
