Laguna College of Art and Design

A few miles away from the coastal community of Laguna Beach, California is a 4-acre campus with fewer than 500 enrolled students dedicated to traditional skill-building in the arts.

Laguna College of Art and Design, or LCAD for short, has majors in fine art, illustration, animation, graphic design, and game art. Faculty member Jason Dowd, right, told me that the game art division has grown the fastest, doubling in recent years.

A masters program in painting emphasizes traditional skills in representational figure painting and drawing. There are 14 teaching studios devoted to painting, drawing, sculpture, and digital techniques.

The reference bone collection includes not just human skeletons, but also an elephant skull. Marshall Vandruff, whose animal anatomy series has recently been featured in ImagineFX magazine, teaches occasional classes at the school. Students have drawn at several live animal sessions, where handlers have brought in bears, wolves, horses, and chimpanzees.

The librarian said that the most popular circulating items are the Gnomon videos. Other art school librarians have said the same thing.

Illustration department chairman Michael Savas, right, said, “We stress visual thinking. You’ve got to learn the characteristics of what you’re drawing, and then learn how to implement them.” Mr. Savas was an early adopter of digital techniques, and has taught a class in digital drawing from observation, but he values traditional skills equally.

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LCAD official website.
Wikipedia on LCAD.
Marshall Vandruff website.

Art Institute Inland Empire

Tucked away in a professional-looking office park in San Bernardino California is Art Institute Inland Empire, a career-minded school that trains artists in game art, web design, animation, fashion, and the culinary arts.

Santosh Oommen, the school’s academic director, (left) takes time away from his career in animation and visual effects to teach at the school. The school's geographic position in southern California allows it to attract a faculty with deep professional experience.

Students in the class on conceptual storytelling, taught by Stephen Bautista, sometimes work with classic stories, such as The Island of Dr. Moreau, by H.G. Wells. They design characters and environments to blend with the source mood and material.

At the beginning of their academic program, everyone is issued a wheeled backpack preloaded with textbooks that they’ll use in their foundational classes.

The school was crowded the day I visited because orientation was going on, so some people had a hard time seeing the screen.

Although young artists become versed in the state-of-the-art digital tools, they start out with traditional figure drawing and perspective. “We believe that traditional mediums are the way to start, and they go from there,” Mr. Oommen told me.
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Official website, link.

Illustration Master Class Enrollment Opens

Rebecca Guay has just announced that enrollment for the Illustration Master Class 2010 is now open! The class will run for a full week, June 12-18th, 2010. This will be the third year of the IMC, which will be taught by a team of fantasy artists working right alongside the students, and I'll be privileged to join in the fun this time.

To register for enrollment, please visit the Illustration Master Class website.

Group photo courtesy Tor art director and blogger Irene Gallo, who will be covering the event.

Cal State Fullerton

Yesterday Jeanette and I stopped by Cal State Fullerton, which has a tremendous animation and illustration program.

After my talk, we were joined for lunch by Larry Johnson, Cliff Cramp (center), and Hala Swearingen, and a group of students.

We were hosted by an on-campus group called the "Pencil Mileage Club," who gave us a really cool sketch bag and sketchbook and pen. The Pencil Mileage club not only brings in speakers, but they take sketching field trips, they compare notes on networking, and they eat pizza and watch movies.

Thanks for inviting us! Photos courtesy Cliff Cramp and Dana Lamb on Facebook.

We've been visiting a bunch of other schools and studios, but haven't had much time to post.

Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design

Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Lakewood, Colorado, has about 600 enrolled students. Illustration is the biggest department with about 120 students, but it also offers majors in game art, graphic design and digital media, animation, interior design, art education, and fine arts.

The 23-acre campus once served as a care center for tuberculosis patients. The historic buildings face now onto flower-bedecked lawns where students occasionally paint outdoors en plein air.

In the sculpture and fine art building, student Will Fortenberry was in the midst of taking apart an old projector as part of a “Deconstruction/Reconstruction” assignment. The machine’s light and fan were still wired up. He had sketches of how he planned to rebuild it as a robot.


The animation building had a variety of workstations for experimental animation, ranging from traditional cel animation and stop motion to the latest 3D software. Instructor Jeff Jurich showed me some of the stop motion puppets built from Sculpey, soft foam, and armature wire.

Illustration and animation students benefit from videoconferenced critiques with industry professionals like Michael Knapp of Blue Sky Studios.

After my presentation, I had the opportunity to visit Cherish Flieder’s computer illustration class. Each student described how he or she was approaching their conceptual assignment, which was to show how the human body is composed of not just of its own cells, but a host of foreign parasites and beneficial microbes.

Before he came to RMCAD, illustration department chairman Larry Kresek was instrumental in establishing the program at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida. “We put together a program there that was mainly editorial,” he said. But when he came to RMCAD, he and his colleagues took a fresh look at the curriculum in the light of changes in the market.

“It occurred to me the industry was looking for a lot of new skills, not just in print illustration, but in production design and animation, so we set up a course of study that is heavy on traditional drawing and storytelling.”

Wikipedia on RMCAD
RMCAD website, link.

Gurney at LAAFA October 10

On October 10 at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art in Van Nuys, CA, I’ll be doing three different illustrated lectures back to back.

The first one is about how to paint a realistic picture of an imaginary scene. The second is all about color and light, and how to use them effectively in your artwork. The third is about the history and technique of plein air painting and informal sketching. They’re all new lectures, with some of the best stuff from the blog.

Sign up soon. The space there is limited, and it’s first come-first served.

Registration for the Gurney lectures at LAAFA.
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Added later: hopefully the links work now!

Woodstock 4: Maquettes

The creature design class at Woodstock School of Art continued with Day 4 today. Eric Millen bulked up the muscles of his SuperPan.

Eric and Mike loaned the oven in the on-campus barn lodging to cure the Sculpey maquettes.

Lester Yocum decapitated "Fluffy," a stuffed animal he bought last night to use its fake fur. He's actually a really nice guy.

That beige fur was perfect for Lester's lady, a female Pan character with a red glitter dress and plenty of attitude.

Mike Marrocco decided to do a self portrait with Flynn's horns.

Maureen Rogers laid in watercolor washes on her Pan.

All of these maquettes will guide the final painting, which we'll at least start tomorrow.

Woodstock 3: Goat Day

This morning, Billy the goat from Southlands Foundation Farm climbed into Trusty Rusty and rode with us to the Woodstock School of Art where he served as the star model for the goat half of our Pan characters.

Clockwise from lower left: Billy enjoys the attention from David and Eric, Billy checked out Shawn Field's computer, Eric Millen built up his Sculpey Pan figure maquette, and Shawn and Michael Marrocco worked out their character concepts.

Christina Neno showed the relaxed style of maquette building, while David Troncoso sculpted away with Flynn nearby for reference.

Left to right: Lester Yocum came up with an awesome matronly female Pan character, which he sketched on a board and sculpted in 3-D; As David worked, Jeanette (in background) watched Billy, who stayed on his tarp indoors because it was pouring rain outside; Michael gets the Hero's Badge for doing the end-of-day cleanup.
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Thanks, Lenny, for letting us borrow Billy!

The Grand Central Academy

Most people think of drawing as a form of personal expression, a mark of individual style. But before the twentieth century, drawing was regarded more as a basic way to understand the world, a path of knowledge that was unavailable to the casual observer. If you could draw, the world’s secrets would open to you.

According to art historian Barbara Anderman, “Seventeenth-century French art theorists…conceived of drawing as the means by which the intellect could apprehend reality, before the imagination could render it with expression.”

This sense of drawing as a path to a special kind of knowledge infuses the Grand Central Academy in New York City. The drawing is by Ariel Zabloski.

The art school is on the sixth floor of an 1880s building, which it shares with the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America (ICA & CA). The Grand Central Academy and its forerunner, the Water Street Atelier, were both founded by Jacob Collins. Above, Spencer Brainard copies a plate from the Charles Bargue Drawing course.

According to its website, the school “was created by professional, exhibiting artists to offer classical training to serious students.”

The GCA includes an impressive roster of teachers, such as Travis Schlaht and Edward Minoff. One of Mr. Collins’s students was Juliette Aristides, who wrote the Classical Painting Atelier.

Students at the Grand Central Academy begin by copying line drawings and plaster casts. The casts of Renaissance and antique sculpture come from the 200-cast collection of the ICA & CA, who acquired them from the Metropolitan Museum.

On one wall is a set of cubby holes with plaster noses, ears, and eyes that you can check out and study. Tacked up on the wall are various drawings and paintings by students and masters alike.

Angela Cunningham was in the process of painting this amazing oil copy of a polychromed head. The light over each work area is shielded so that it doesn’t spill over into the adjacent space. The windows are blacked out, giving the studios the feeling of a secret laboratory.

To supplement the classes in observational work, the GCA offers special courses in anatomy, sculpture, perspective and art history.

But the foundation of everything at the GCA is close observation. “I believe in a late introduction of anatomy,” Mr. Collins told me, explaining that he didn’t want any system of analysis to get in the way of pure seeing.

The school has set a high ambition: “to offer a public place for the revival of the classical art tradition; to foster and support a community of artists in pursuit of aesthetic refinement, a high level of skill and beauty.”
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Grand Central Academy, link.

U of T Biomedical Communication

The University of Toronto offers a graduate study program for people who love art and also have a background in biology, physiology, anatomy, or nursing.

Nick Woolridge showed Jeanette and me the large collection of medical illustrations by various artists, including original drawings by the German medical illustrator Max Brödel from the venerable Grant’s Atlas of Anatomy (1943).



The 32 students in the Biomedical Communications program learn the time-honored technique of carbon dust on clay-coated board. They also master 2D digital techniques and 3D animation.

Graduates of the program work for animation studios, book publishers, pharmaceutical companies, and documentary producers. “This is art as applied to medicine,” Mr. Woolridge said.


The two-year Master of Science graduate program in Biomedical Communication is part of the U of T’s Institute of Medical Science and is only one of five accredited programs of its kind in North American and the only one in Canada.

The five members of full-time faculty works closely with experts in the University of Toronto's medical school, giving the students a chance to have their work reviewed and critiqued by specialists like surgeons, pathologists, and immunologists.

During the tour we visited Grant’s Anatomy Museum, which houses the original dissections made for J.B. Grant’s An Atlas of Anatomy (1943). Obviously I couldn’t take photographs there, but the collection includes dozens of partially-dissected and cross-sectioned human cadavers preserved in clear fluid, each illuminated from above within a darkened room. The atmosphere in the room was hushed and focused, and students were drawing from the exhibits.

Students also have access to the operating rooms of nine of Toronto’s teaching hospitals where they can observe and sketch during surgery. Surgeons-in-training need the work of artists to clarify forms that cameras can’t see.
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Website for UofT’s Biomedical Communications, link.
Teaching facilities, link.
Thanks, Nick and Gordon!

Seneca College

Imagine an art school where they bring a tiger to pose as a model.


Or they let you draw outdoors from an armored knight on a draft horse.

Seneca College in Toronto, Ontario offers a certificate program in art fundamentals that covers drawing, illustration, design, color theory, photography and art history. Students can then follow degree programs in a wide range of art specialties, including animation, game art, and 3D digital animation.

Taught by working professional artists, the program is designed to give aspiring artists the tools they need to communicate visually.
One of Seneca’s instructors is Werner Zimmermann, who teaches life drawing. In his blog "Man4Art" he shares some of his off-the-cuff sketches, like this one of a dog and a cat on scrap paper.

He gives his students a deep understanding of anatomy by having them sculpt the muscle sets layer by layer from modeling clay.

After I gave my presentation, program coordinator Phillip Woolf posed for a quick portrait demonstration. Later, he explained his philosophies of art education.

“My teaching is an epic battle against shape and outline,” he said. He wants his students to get away from seeing the obvious outer facts of the model, but rather to explore “gesture, massing, and bulking of form,”….to “see structurally and draw structurally.”

Toronto is a competitive environment for art schools as well as being one of the major arts capitals of North America, with a host of leading animation studios.

Seneca has earned one of the finest reputations for the education it delivers to the motivated student. As Mr. Woolf said, “our graduates have all the techniques to take them on their own journey.”

Seneca's Art Fundamentals Program, link.
Seneca's Visual Arts Program, link.
More on building anatomy in clay, link. Thanks, Larry!

Columbus College of Art and Design

Columbus College of Art and Design, better known as CCAD, occupies several quiet blocks behind the city art museum in downtown Columbus, Ohio.


Jeanette and I pulled up in Trusty Rusty, right beneath the famous “ART” arch.

The school offers four-year major programs in many art and design fields, but we visited mainly with people from the illustration department.

The school has a world-famous faculty. Chris (C. F.) Payne, who heads the illustration department is one of America’s most celebrated contemporary illustrators, known for his gentle humor and dead-on characterization.

He recently painted the portrait of Barack Obama for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue.

He posed while I did a quick portrait demo in water-soluble colored pencils.

Mark Hazlerig teaches three dimensional illustration. He showed us his latex bust of a female satyr, which he described as a cross between Uma Thurman, LeAnne Rimes, and a sheep. She has cast resin horns, glass eyes, and a light beard, applied one hair at a time.

If male satyrs knew about her, they would never have bothered with nymphs!

CCAD has all the classes you’d expect on color theory, figure drawing, composition, digital techniques and concepts in illustration. Some courses allow them to draw from costumed models, sketch at the zoo, and design comics.

Mark Sullivan (second from right below) is a multitalented alumnus of CCAD and visiting lecturer. He is an Oscar-nominated matte painter for Lucasfilm and Imagemovers who made the transition from his traditionally painted mattes (Bugsy) to digital work on Polar Express and the upcoming Christmas Carol.

He also has a love for traditional stop motion effects. He is in the process of creating this Dimetrodon model out of foam-rubber over a jointed metal armature.

Stewart McKissick (at right in the photo above) also teaches illustration. He’s constantly updating the curriculum to make it relevant to the changing market, and to reflect the growing interest in CG animation, visual effects, character design, and conceptual design for movies and video games.

“Kids want to swim in the pop culture soup they grew up in,” he said.

What struck me about CCAD was that the whole school seems serious about keeping up with the evolving art world as well as staying rooted in the basic skills of drawing and painting—all the while having fun doing it.
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Home Website for CCAD, link.
Thanks, Stewart for a bunch of those photos, since my camera died!

Academy of Realist Art

The Academy of Realist Art in Toronto teaches its students the skills of careful observation based on classical methods.


One of the principal instructors, Fernando Freitas, recently took me through the building to explain the course of study.

The curriculum is based on the book by Charles Bargue and Jean Leon Gerome, which was originally produced in the mid-nineteenth century for the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

There is no portfolio entrance requirement. Students come from all different backgrounds and ages. Each student follows the same series of steps or levels. They move ahead to the next step whenever they’re ready.

The first skill to master is to reproduce a two-dimensional drawing. The goal is to learn to capture shapes and to understand the division of light and shadow.

The next stage is a vine charcoal or carbon pencil study to understand the effect of light and shade on a plaster cast. The drawing and the cast are set up side by side in the same light and checked until they match perfectly.

This so-called “sight size method” takes a lot of floor space because you have to back up from the subject and see the drawing and the model in one view. Two students generally work side by side from the same cast.

They then move to painted studies of casts, still life studies, and painted studies from the nude model. Some studies can take 30 to 60 hours of work.

Mr. Freitas also encourages students to learn from the classic texts on drawing and painting by Harold Speed. He has produced an instructional DVD called Drawing the Figure, which follows the process of creating a tonal drawing of a standing figure from start to finish.

“We’re more an academy than an atelier,” Mr. Freitas said, “because we are based on an objective, classical approach rather than the working methods of one individual master.”

The atmosphere of the school is focused, energetic, and collaborative, more like a martial arts academy than a free-form art school. It feels like entering the dojo with a clear mind, focused on the task at hand, leaving behind your worldly concerns. One easel was emblazoned with a sign “I SEEK EXCELLENCE.”

The way of learning art at ARA is very different from other schools, and I know that not everyone agrees with it. I’ve heard the criticism that the sight-size academic method it leads to uniform results, or that it amounts to passive copying.

I think those views misunderstand the objectives of classical training. The purpose is not to teach style or personal expression, but rather to give each growing artist a solid foundation to build on, and to offer them a deep familiarity with classical models and timeless standards. Drawing and painting at that level of sensitivity is a very active process indeed. It deeply engages every fiber of a student’s being.

The ARA is not trying to be everything to everyone, and I believe that is their strength. The results that are framed up in the hallway are nothing short of breathtaking, and the sense of shared purpose among the students is palpable.

There is much every art school can learn from the example of the ARA. I believe that every art student should have the chance to go far beyond the 20 or 30 minute poses that are common in many art schools and to see how finely they can tune their response to the visual world.
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Official Website for the Toronto school (with a new campus just opened in Boston, MA), link.
Freitas video on drawing the figure, link.
Bargue book on Amazon, link.
More about the sight size method, link.