ART 101 - Advanced Drawing: Digital Drawing and Animation

Upper Division

This comprehensive Digital Drawing and Animation class applies traditional drawing skills to digital art. We will look at and analyze a variety of digital drawing and moving image animated art forms and learn how to paint and draw comfortably using a Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop. We will master and customize our software interface for digital painting and create artwork independently. Animation, a unique and expressive art form is more than just a genre of film, it is a hybrid of visual art, film, and sometimes music, a unique time-based expressive art form with its own history and rapidly evolving future. Highly encouraged toward the development of personal creative and collaborative work, visual storytelling skills, and experimentation, students will produce original digital drawings and animated digital videos. Students will experience screenings and discussions of art, animation, and film on a weekly basis as well as practice film critique of their own and peer creations. An emphasis on the power of storytelling through animation will inform our work together. Principles of animation such as registration, rhythm, pacing, the physics of movement, and animation history and terminology will be woven throughout. The course will be built around the creation of three main digital projects, with exercises, screenings, readings, and activities surrounding each project. Students will be able to choose techniques and ideas they have been exposed to during the three main projects to use in their final film or digital drawing series and will be expected to successfully complete the pre-production, principal photography, and post-production process. Students are expected to keep an active physical or digital visual journal for artistic research weekly and there is sketching, storyboarding and pre-production expected in preparation for each project as well as a written reflection. Throughout the semester students will practice using the Artist’s Habits of Mind of craftsmanship, persistence, imagination, expression, observation, reflection, inquiry, and connection to the larger community. We will work to create a vibrant, collaborative learning community among the participants in the course and to actively make connections outside of ourselves to the art, film, and animation worlds and to the larger contexts we individually and collectively live in. With continued effort and practice, students will grow as thinkers, artists, animators, and scholars

Core Curriculum Designation(s)
AA - Artistic Understanding (Analysis), CP - Artistic Understanding (Creative Practice)

Term Offered
Course offered every other term.

Repeatable
May be repeated as content varies.

Fee
$60

Course credits: 1