Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/929567
26 P E R S P E C T I V E | M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 8 education A A. Caricature drawing class with artist John Quinn III. B. Members enjoying drawing from the model during a class at LAAFA. C. Figure drawing on a tablet in an LAAFA class. D. Sculpting class with artist Adam Matano. The programs developed cover three important areas of creative skills: • Traditional art techniques • Digital software tools and techniques • Creative information resources The need for traditional skills remains strong. It is a common mantra among studios, well understood in the Art Department, that it is relatively easy to teach the button pushing required to operate software, but very hard to teach the traditional skills of composition, color, design and emotion; the skills required so that artists would know which button to push and why. Software continues to grow as an integrated part of the design process, such that many studios find it necessary to establish a digital pipeline to improve and economize the flow of information between design, direction, production, fabrication and post production. These pipelines may change with the preferences of the studio, the Art Department and the visual effects partners. How does one choose the software that will allow one to work in all these different scenarios? Most certainly, by getting your hands on the various software programs currently in play in the industry, and learning how to use them effectively. We can take classes in any of the various software currently in use in the business and, by hands-on experience, determine if it's something we can use and feel comfortable with. Then we have some basis for investing in the cost of a particular software license and spending the additional time in training that such a choice will require. Information resources, delivered creatively, fill those gaps in our knowledge that arise whenever we tackle new projects and attempt to find new ways to deliver "something no one's ever seen before." It is the refresher to all those aspects of the creative world that time has not permitted us to explore. While I love the utility of the internet to help me research a project, I'm equally appreciative of a class that can reacquaint me with the structure of the historical periods, so I have a better idea of what I'm looking for, where it fits in the period world, how it came to be and what else it's related to. A B C D