- WINTER SPRING 2025 Mon, Jan 6 – Mon, Jun 16, 2025
Winter break: Mon, Feb 17 – Sat, Feb 22, 2025
Spring break: Mon, Apr 14 – Sat, Apr 19, 2025
Memorial Day: Mon, May 26, 2025 - All prospective students are encouraged to register before the beginning of each semester as places are limited. A registration after the beginning of the semester will be considered only if places are available.
Digital Painting is an intensive foundation course created for anyone interested in learning how to create digital art. As a beginner course, students are introduced to the basics of Photoshop, and the foundations of perspective, human anatomy, tone, and value. We highly recommend this course for anyone interested in pursuing a career as an entertainment artist.
The Landscape course introduces students to techniques for painting natural and man-made landscapes in Photoshop. This course heavily emphasizes perspective techniques, starting from one-point perspective and building up to five-point perspective.
The Portrait course reviews essential skills for portrait painting in Photoshop, including proportion, facial features, and value. Traditional painting techniques will be applied onto a digital format.
for Games
The Character Design for Games course leads you step-by-step through the character design process. This course emphasizes the fundamentals of gesture drawing, anatomy, storytelling, and perspective. With these foundational skills, students then move onto experimenting with various body types and silhouettes to create distinct and memorable characters.
for Illustration & Comics
The Character Design for Illustration & Comics course reviews the design process for creatures in TV and feature animation. Students begin by studying the anatomies and movements of several animals, before creating their very own creatures. This class emphasizes exaggerated shapes and proportions, as well as experimenting with gesture and facial expressions.
The Ashcan Environment Design course focuses on the creation of captivating digital environments from start to finish. Our classes emphasize environment design fundamentals — perspective, composition, and storytelling — as well as digital painting techniques to help create stunning environments and atmosphere.
Prop Design encompasses vehicles, weapons, and architecture, and is incredibly valuable in immersing the audience in a story and world. Our course will introduce students to the basic design principles of different vehicles and weapons, before students move onto developing their own original designs.
Foundation
Bring your characters to life in our 2D animation Foundation course. Students are introduced to the foundations of animation, learning to pose, breakdown, and in-between characters. Weekly lectures teach classical techniques for developing well-structured and fluid animations that can be applied to traditional frame-by-frame, hand-drawn, and FX.
Comics involve many compositions that are used to visually tell a story. You may already know some of these compositions, like close-ups or wide shots. In the Comic Composition course, we introduce students to commonly used angles in comics, using different perspective techniques for reference.
In this course, students learn the basic functions of ZBrush Core and 3D modeling. Classes focus on sculpting from simplified forms to create polished 3D models, while learning several tools from Z-brush Core’s interface. All techniques learned throughout the course will be applied in a final project: modeling a creature or character.
Game Concept Design
Thinking of applying to your dream school, or to that dream job? Our individualized Concept & Game Design Portfolio course guides students through the process of developing a competitive portfolio for top art schools and jobs in the games industry. This course covers all areas of design, and is tailored to coincide with the individual’s own story and ideas.
Character Design
Interested in applying to a job in character design? The Character Design Portfolio course guides students on developing eye-catching character design portfolios, with strong emphasis on storytelling and shape design.
Manga & Comics
Interested in applying to jobs as a comic artist? How about publishing your own stories? The Manga & Comics Portfolio course guides students on developing professional comics to be pitched to publishers.
Digital Illustration
Our Digital Illustration portfolio course is designed to help students develop competitive illustration portfolios that make them stand out to potential clients. This course is tailored to each student’s interests and desired field, including but not limited to: children’s illustration, book covers, and fantasy card games.
2D Animation
Through this course, demonstrations and hands-on exercises, animation students learn squash and stretch, follow-through, key framing and overlap techniques while creating their own short animation projects. This is one of the first classes future animators take to learn basic animation skills.
