We’re SO excited to announce that we’ll have not one, not two, but THREE new workshops starting this Fall! Our primary goal is always to help our students become better artists through expert mentorship, a great curriculum, and an amazing community of students and mentors—and we’ve designed our new workshops with those goals front and center. Now, without further ado, here’s what you can look forward to in the Fall!
Drumroll please…..
Introduction to Digital Painting
The character, creature, environment, prop, and background designs that determine the look and feel of your favorite movies, TV shows, and games all probably started with a painting.
In Introduction to Digital Painting, you will learn to understand the basics of what makes a successful painting, to choose the right tools, and to apply these skills to your own interests and career path. You’ll learn the fundamentals of the painting process as well as time-saving workflows within Photoshop. Storytelling is also an important part of any visual medium, and you’ll learn how to use digital painting to share your own stories.
This workshop can be for students with little to no painting experience. Using Photoshop, we’ll start with the very basics of what is needed to create a successful painting using digital workflows. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have created a final illustration of your own design and gained valuable knowledge of the tools needed to keep refine your craft of visual storytelling.
Meet Your Mentor: Justin Owens
You might recognize Justin Owens as Animation Mentor’s Director of Curriculum! He’s a familiar face for students, as he’s often leading demos, tutorials, and the weekly campus video news. He’s previously worked as Lead Art Director for several projects at indie game studios and as a freelance designer and 3D generalist. Whether its landscapes or characters, Justin is always interested in the storytelling opportunities of paint. His digital painting skills are bolstered by over 7 years of working in oils and other traditional mediums.
Visual Development: Principles of Design
Visual Development Artists—also sometimes called Concept Artists—have a huge impact across the entire entertainment industry, from animation, to live-action films, to video games, and beyond! Their artistic visions help to bring some of the most iconic characters and worlds to a global audience.
Visual Development Artists determine the tone, mood, color scheme, and more for all the characters, environments, clothes, and objects in a film, game, or TV show. They dream up completely new worlds and bring them to life in the form of 2D or 3D drawings and paintings to help serve the creative vision for the project.
Learning the fundamental principles of visual development is an important first step. The foundation of visual development is shape design. Understanding not only the importance of designing with shapes, but also how best to use shapes to actually create what you’re envisioning is important. Shape design is among the most essential foundational skills used by any Visual Development Artist: Character Designers, Environment Designers, etc.
Whether you’re interested in pursuing character or environment design, becoming a concept artist, or you’re an animator hoping to strengthen your poses and overall skills, mastering the fundamental principles of design is a worthwhile goal. The techniques, theories, and skills you’ll learn in this workshop can be applied to any visual or spatial medium: games, virtual reality, animation, you-name-it!
Meet Your Mentor: Nolen Lee
Nolen is a civil-engineer-turned-freelance artist and the creator of Punching Pandas!
Previsualization Basics for Animators
Our students and alumni have been asking for a previs class for so long, and now we have one!
Previsual animation is used in all types of film and television, so previs skills are extremely valuable whether you’re interested in working on animated films, live-action films, TV, or even games!
Learning previs is a great way to push your animation skills into a creative role earlier in the production pipeline. A Previs Artist starts with rough building blocks—just the storyboards or script—which they interpret into a 3D space through camera staging and animation. In this workshop, you’ll learn how animation and camera work are used to help take a project all the way from script to screen.
You’ll also build on your existing animation abilities by: learning how to read a script, planning a sequence, experimenting with cameras, and adding temporary effects. By the end of this workshop, you will have taken part of a script and created your own previs sequence!
This is a great workshop for intermediate and advanced animators excited to learn in a fast-paced and challenging environment—you’ll come out the other side with 15–30 seconds of animation to add to your reel! Not too shabby.
Meet Your Mentor: Nicole Herr
This workshop is taught by the one and only Nicole Herr! Nicole is a 19+ year animation veteran and currently works at Digital Domain. She was the Senior Previs Character Animator for The Lion King, Rampage, The Jungle Book and has also done previsualization work for The Flash and Supergirl! You will learn SO MUCH from her.
Woot woot! We can’t wait to get these workshops rolling. Be sure to visit their pages for more information and don’t hesitate to ask us if you have any questions! Hope to see you on campus soon 🙂
Want to round out your animation skills?
Animation Mentor has a wide variety of workshops for you to choose from! Try your hand at game animation or storyboarding—or add some much-needed animal and creature animation to your demo reel! Starting in Fall or 2018, you can even check out different parts of the animation pipeline with our new workshops in Previs, Visual Development, or Digital Painting. You name it, we’ve got it. Learn more about all the ways you can become a better animator!
