Working with Royal Journeys

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One more week

My girls in San Francisco at the start of the workshop. They brought me down here and we had a killer 4th of July.

It’s Sunday night and I am just about to hit the sack. This has been a really great workshop so far. I am a little stressed about the Illustration and Graphic Design projects, but I am sure that I will prevail. I may not sleep much this week, but that’s how we play the game.

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Photography Class

Riding on the BART at the end of the day. Look at that light.

Photograph was great today. I learned more that I ever knew about metering. I’m talking metering modes, some of the math of metering, how light affects metering and more. We also talked about light and color along with white balance and how to really get control over what I am shooting. I would bet that many of the students are wishing we would talk more about the emotion and impulse of photography, the art stuff. No, this is exactly what I want. I get the artsy stuff in school (I’m registered for Color Photo this next semester).

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Mood board

The Books mood board (a collage-type of composition meant to help with exploration). A sample of The Books' music is found below.

I am well into the second week of workshops (I have ‘classes’ Wed-Fri). Today I had graphic design and am now getting ready for my photography class.

Today we turned in/presented our mood boards and had a crit of our first round logo sketches. Mood boards are a very new concept to me. Basically, it is a way to take those first steps of exploration in a design project. You take images, colors, messages, type, textures and what ever else that might communicate the message of a design project, and you make a loose composition/collage of those elements.

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Drawing Day

One of the hallways in the Foundations Drawing departments at Academy of Art University.

I am trying to document the day-to-day facets of this workshop, the behind the scenes, if you will. Here is one picture of the facilities here at Academy of Art University. Luckily, I am also taking a photography class and am therefore taking some pictures that help to illustrate what this experience is like.

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Friday

In the tunnel

This is really turning out to be a great week. Today I had my Web Design and New Media class. We are focussing on flash, one of those things I haven’t touched in a long time. I never learned flash from an industry professional. I am excited about what we are working on in that class. More to come on that in the coming weeks.

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Design and Photo Day

Quote by Ralph Caplan

The ride on the train and getting around is becoming more routine. Today I had two more classes: Graphic Design and Photography. Both were excellent.

The Graphic Design instructor earned his MFA in Graphic Design from AAU and has since gone on to work independently, to work for a historical society in town and to do a number of other designerish things. He now teaches at the school and works as a designer as well as sits on the local AIGA board, over education.

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Classes Begin

Charcoal drawing done in about 90 min. I'm a little Rusty.

Today was the first day of classes. I had drawing (covering basics from form to light and shadow to perspective and so on). The classroom was really pretty cool. Its in this very open warehouse type of space with cement floors. The area is divided by large, industrial wooden dividers on casters. It all feels very contemporary.

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SFMOMA

Source: Robert Frank

No Tuesday classes. Turns out today was the free day at the Museum of Modern Art – I just can’t say no. The museum was great. Lots of good stuff, mostly permanent collections. Sculpture, painting, installation and on and on. I’ve seen plenty of modern art at museums, and this was all pretty par for the course. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t have a ton of time (about three hours is all), but not much really jumped out at me, except for one thing…

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Day One

Source: highend3d.com

Registration

Today was the good ole registration. This was my first real interaction with the AAU campus. After finding the old, early 1900’s era auditorium building, I registered, sat down and waited for the orientation meeting. A reel of fashion runway tape played on the projector as hundreds of strangers filed into the room. It was surprising how little talking was going on, I certainly wasn’t talking. I had sketchbook in hand, doodling.

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