Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Monstare

I just realized that in my crazy schedule the last month, I never took the time to announce officially my change in jobs. I decided to leave Disney and teach at BYU full-time. This semester they have me teaching digital painting for animation, character design, and gesture drawing. BYU has a great animation program and the students are very talented so I'm excited to see what kinds of things we can do there.
I have no idea if the students are getting anything out of my character design class but at least I've been having fun doing the assignments with them. This assignment was to design a monster that was both scary and had a personality. This idea was based on the criteria we had on an unreleased project I worked on at Disney/Avalanche several years back.

8 comments:

  1. wow, I had no idea! congratulations on the new job! Great drawing by the way!

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  2. Anonymous9:52 PM

    You discredit yourself to "wonder if the students are getting anything out of my character design class". I had the privilege of taking one of your BYU courses several years ago and it was one of the highlights of my education. I gleaned a lot of practical skill and inspiration from that class. Unless you've gotten worse since then I can't imagine your current students benefit any less :)

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    1. Thank you, anonymous one! I do try to make my classes helpful, but I think part of that effort is never assuming that I'm doing the right thing and being willing to change anything if it's not working. So it's not just self-deprication, I'm honestly reserving judgement until we're at enough further on in the class to measure if what I'm teaching is the right stuff or not. But thank you!

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  3. Anonymous6:12 PM

    Sam, you were one of the reasonss I wished I could work at Avalanche. lol. How exactly does your class work? Do the students buy their own tablet or are they provided? Will you teach multiple painting programs? How many classes are a part of your painting series because You pretty much need all four years in my opinion. Oh yeah, are you going to stress anatomy because my art school really didn't stress how important that is.

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    1. Thanks Anon! For the character design class the students can choose whether to use traditional or digital tools. My digital painting class is in a lab with Cintiqs, but the students are required to buy a stylus. Unfortunately, the digital painting class is only one semester right now. Illustration program students have more painting classes but there isn't much in the animation program. I might try to adjust that. I stress anatomy pretty strongly in my classes (although I focus on the structures that anatomy creates rather than just bones and muscles because that structure is applicable even in designs that are strongly stylized).

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  4. Congrats to your new job! I'm sure that the school is superlucky to have you teaching there full-time :)

    Will you be able to show us some of the pieces you make during the lectures? I'm sepceially excited to see the ones you make while teaching digital painting.

    Cute monster! At first I though that the person was a pencil though, so my impression was that the monster liked art haha.

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    1. Thanks Andrea! I'm hoping that one of the benefits of being at BYU is that I can show anything I want. I can't show hardly anything from Disney, even still. As soon as I get my classes organized better I'll start making stuff that is worth posting.
      The guy does look a bit like a pencil. I didn't want to scale my brush down so the strokes had a consistent weight, but I didn't compensate by making his silhouette more obvious. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll fix it when I have time to paint it up.

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  5. Dang, those are some lucky students.

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