Classes and stuff

So I finally met with my advisor and I signed up for classes next Spring. If you're interested, I'll be taking:

Illustration 232 - Illustration 1 - Sec. 1 - M: 12-6:20
Illustration 222 - Heads and Hands 1 - Sec. 5 - Th: 8:30-2:50
Illustration 310 - History of American Illustrators - Online
Fine Art 110 - Still Life Painting 1 - Tu: 8:30-2:50

This way you can come take a class with me, or know how to avoid me. But you should especially come take the Ill 310 class with me...because, you know, it's online, and I'll see you like, uh, never. Yeah, lame joke that probably didn't even read as a joke. Did I ever tell you my clown joke, btw?

Anyway, so I have to meet with the Illustration Chair, Chuck Pyle (not the Country singer, or so he says) to change my major over to Illustration. Not a big deal, but I should probably do it as I've taken only 1 Graphic Design class, and I'm already signed up for Illustration stuff.

Anyhoo, Eve and I have big plans for January, but I don't want to say too much lest I jinx us.

Anyway, so here's my villain design for my Digital Illustration class. Anyone have any tips on how to paint pinstripe pants? He's supposed to be some sort of creepy chimney sweep, like a dark character from a demented Mary Poppins. He eats children, and he gets into their rooms by turning into ashy smoke and creeping through the chimneys. I suppose he'll be having a (hopefully) epic battle soon with the peasant wizard, her floating books, and maybe some summoned pets of hers.

This school can be so fucking stupid sometimes..

And by this school, I mean Academy of Art University in SF, and by fucking stupid I mean it's bureaucracy is really fucking stupid.

The thing I really like about our school are the classes and the instructors. The instructors are generally super supportive, yet still push you to not suck. I really liked the fact that you don't need a portfolio to get into the BFA program, and they foster a lot of people who didn't necessarily think of art as a first choice. They also foster people who would probably not succeed in a traditional university setting.

However, this tends to make the administrative policies stifling for me. They won't let me sign up for classes online because I'm on the payment plan, and thus I need to see my advisor. Which is stupid, because I already know which classes I need to take. Although I can see why most kids might need an advisor, I've been figuring out my own class schedule for the past 5 years, I think I know what I'm doing.

Sigh.

And I can't pre-pay and just have my advisor sign a form, because to pay you need to have registered for classes, and to register for classes, you need your advisor's signature first. Thus, all the other steps I need to take are all held up because I have to wait for a time slot to just tell my advisor exactly which classes and sections I want so then she can sign my stupid form. Seriously, this is silly. And it should be noted that once I register, I can completely change ALL of my classes online. What's even the point of having to meet an advisor if I can completely change my schedule? Advisors should be there to advise, not to be a mandatory hurdle I have to pass to sign up for my classes.

Additionally, I heard that the advisors are generally there to put kids into classes with the less-famous teachers in the less popular time slots in order to justify having each teacher on board. Everyone wants to take Henry Yan's Figure Drawing class (I did), so his classes fill up first if they don't regulate and put kids in other instructor's classes. It must be noted, however, that even though Henry is an amazing artist, I feel like I've been getting more out of Ruben Deanda's figure drawing workshop. In terms of art, Ruben is also pretty frickin' amazing, but Henry is still definitely superb. But, you only really hear about Henry Yan, and I think if you're more of a beginner, Ruben probably is the better teacher. But I digress. mandatory advisor meetings = poo!

Anyway, so here's a work-in-progress that I did for my digital illustration class. It was done with pencil, then scanned and colored in photoshop.

Welcome

So I'm at it again. Well, blogging that is. But this time I have a theme! This blog is going to be my record of my journey for my second Bachelor's. This time, a BFA (instead of a BA) at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

So, I'm going to make it a point to start scanning more of my sketches and analog work and not doing anything to my digital work and posting stuff up.

However, since Eve and I have realized that art, culture, and politics are so tightly wrapped up together, there is no separating the two. So there will be posts about political stuff and cultural events, as well as art, and especially posts concerning all three.

Well, for the first post, I guess I had better post some sort of art. Here is a silhouette of some plant/human hybrid I did for a warm-up. It's inspired partly by Bushroot from Darkwing Duck, as well as this plant thing in a Superman comic I read, and from the environment of the Fallout computer game.