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.