What you will learn
The course is very practical and consists of a combination of lectures, exercises and assignments with a strong emphasis on your drawing skills, meeting you at level you are at.
Classical drawing makes out a little more than half of the course time, starting with a few weeks dedicated to classical drawing to build up a good drawing foundation. The rest of the time is divided approximately 50-50 between classical drawing classes and workshops on various aspects of visual storytelling. During the workshops, you will build up a good foundation of many different aspects of visual storytelling and maybe create material for your portfolio.
Towards the end of the course, you get the chance to talk to a mentor, who can help you understand how you can keep improving your portfolio after the course and direct it towards the study programme of your choice.
Classical drawing lessons
Classical drawing is a great foundation for further visual studies because practicing will make you much faster and more precise. You also develop a valuable understanding of the basic visual principles that all other kinds of drawing build on top of.
You will practice through drawing exercises such as long and short live model studies, as well as studies of plaster heads, human anatomy, objects etc.
Most of the classes of this course are built up around learning the following aspects of drawing:
- Observation
- Composition
- Dynamics and movement
- Proportions
- Light and shadows
- Anatomy
- Construction and volume
Visual storytelling workshops
The visual storytelling workshops cover various related disciplines that you will be asked to show your skills within when creating a portfolio for the bachelor educations of The Animation Workshop. If you already know which bachelor you would like to apply to, you will see that some of the workshops are more directly related to the other bachelors.
However, the topics are closely related, and getting insights into something that is not exactly your point of focus will still be useful for you in the process of building up a set of strong visual storytelling skills. As an example, an aspiring animator might learn something about storytelling in the comic workshop that comes in handy one day when they want to create their own story for a small animation clip, or an aspiring comic artist will benefit from the acting workshop when drawing comics, even though there is not an actual acting category in the Graphic Storytelling portfolio
The visual storytelling workshops include the following topics:
- Acting for animation
- Character design
- Storyboard
- Perspective
- Environment Design
- Comic Creation
- Illustration
What if I am only interested in classical drawing?
Please also take a look at the course TDA Classical Drawing & Painting, if you are not interested in the visual storytelling workshops, but would like to focus on learning the classical art techniques.