Class Finally Starts !!!!!

Okay, so lets see.. It's been 23 days since I last posted.

After all the endless waiting, CLASS HAS FINALLY STARTED AT CALARTS !!!!!!

I've been really busy with all the assignments since the first day of class on September 12th and this place has been really amazing !! I can't believe how much my art and design skills has improved so much over the course of only 4 weeks !!! The instructors, faculty members and people that I've met here so far are just wonderful ! Also, not to mention all the great guest speakers and free pizzas that we have so far !

So here are the classes that I have for this semester (Fall 2011)

Digital Methods I- Fran Krause
Character Design I - Rik Maki
Color & Design - Leo Hobaica
CG Foundation I - Andrew Bac
Writing Arts - Andrea Fontenot
CG Animation I - Lee Gramling
2D Animation I - Matt Williames
Screenwriting For Animators - Nicole Panter
Story I - Chong Lee
Life Drawing I - Steve Brown
Institute Voice - Kirsten Weist

I'm really happy with most of the classes that I'm taking now but I wanna get over with Writing Arts and most of my critical study classes in my first year so I can have more time to really work on my stuff in my later years. Most of the classes that I have now are real fun and my favorite classes so far has to be Story,Character Design & 2D Animation !

It's only been four weeks but we've been getting tons of assignments weekly and it's building up every week, but again, it's all worth it ! The assignments are really interesting and there are so many talented people here that's so inspiring and motivating!

Our first Character design assignment was to design elephants ! I was really excited about it cuz it was my first Character Design assignment at CalArts ! I designed 16 elephants and there were about 10 that I really liked ! I brought it over to class the following week and I happily pinned them up to the wall since that's what we were told to do. That's how they do it in the professional industry so the supervisor can look at the designs and give some feedbacks. To my surprise, Rik Maki didn't like any of the 16 elephants that I did ! I was disappointed of course. I worked really hard on getting the designs of the elephants down, worked for days and I thought they looked great ! But then, Rik pointed out some serious problem that I had in my elephant drawings, which are :
- designs were too funky
- silhouettes didn't read well and they weren't readable from far.
- lack of research

I looked at my elephant drawings and I thought it was pretty spot-on. I noticed how I got carried away in trying to make the designs look good and appealing but I neglected the importance of silhouette and research.

So here's a picture of the elephant designs that I pinned up to my cube walls. It didn't went well but it'll always be important to me cuz it's my first assignment at CalArts :)



A quote from Rik Maki " The more you do, the more you CAN do. "

So yeah, that's all I have to say for today. I'll be uploading more pictures of my more recent assignments pretty soon. Gonna go to bed now so I can get up early in the morning tomorrow to catch breakfast with some of my friends and then come back and work on my stuff !

Stay tuned !