Coming Soon to Carlsbad Art Farm

After nine busy weeks of summer camp, and time out for some end-of-season vacation time, I'm getting back in the saddle (so to speak) at Art Farm. Thanks to all of you parents who have been patient in waiting to hear back from me concerning after school and Saturday art classes for young students. I will be posting times, dates, fees on this blog soon. The difficult part is getting consensus on best times and days. If you would like to weigh-in on this, please contact me at director@carlsbadartfarm.com.

This year Art Farm is opening up to adults (the quick-sketch painting at right is my own recent effort). We will be offering ongoing classes, workshops and seminars.

If you are interested in wildlife or animal art, please let me know as I am working on having Joe Weatherly (www.joeweatherly.net) come to Art Farm for a 2-Day paint sketch seminar this fall. We will use resident Art Farm animals as models.

Will Weston (www.westonseminars.com) is coming to Art Farm Saturday & Sunday, Nov. 21 & 22, to teach a 2-day, 18-hour seminar on Composition for Artists. The fee is $249. Space is limited to 20, so if you are interested contact me soon at director@carlsbadartfarm.com. A $100 deposit secures your reservation.

This workshop is appropriate for intermediate to advanced students (or the ambitious beginning student!). Will notes that many artists - even very experienced artists - have difficulty with composition. Whether you're a fine artist, landscape painter, composing for animation or film, graphic novels, or children's books, this seminar is designed to help you work through those problems and come away with information and hand-out materials that will enable you to continue leaning after the workshop.

The seminar addresses traditional issues faced when composing environmental drawings by combining lectures, presentations, and demonstrations with selected exercises and hands-on drawing. Using landscape composition as a starting point, students learn to compose pictures with applications to studio art and illustration. Examples are presented and explained in detail. Students do short exercises to direct the eye, create depth and establish mood and time of day. Students then draw a landscape composition under the direction of the instructor. Handouts provided during the seminar enable students to continue learning after the workshop.

About the Instructor: Will is a professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he teaches composition, film composition, digital painting, life drawing, and visual development for animation and film. He is also the curriculum advisor for Art Center's Entertainment Program. Professionally, Will has worked for many studios, including Disney Feature and Television Animation, Nickelodeon, Warner Bros., and Sony Pictures. He also has many years experience working in illustration and advertising.

Designing a Book Cover

The illustration at right is from a tutorial by P.J. Lynch, a highly regarded Irish illustrator of children's books (as well as many other publications). The tutorial, posted at Scamp, an Irish illustrators blogspot, takes you step-by-step through Lynch's process for designing a book cover for an edition of the classic short story, "Gift of the Magi," about a young married couple too poor to buy each other gifts one Christmas. The story is about how they each make a sacrifice to secure a simple gift for each other.

Lynch started by sketching out the images from photographs he had taken of models. He then scanned his drafts into Photoshop and manipulated the composition, noting that he was somewhat new to Photoshop. He also used it as a tool to block in color areas. Later, he used this manipulated draft as a source for his final hand-painted image.

Just as important as the images in his step-by-step tutorial is a close reading of Lynch's text. He talks succinctly about how he uses his models and photographs as source material, but then he talks about how he rearranges elements for best compositional effect.

For example, at one point Lynch moves a bare wood table from the right side of the composition to the left side, noting, "the compositional breakthrough was when I saw that the table with the gift on it could be used as a way to lead the eye in, as well as helping to define the space and telling a little bit about Jim and Della’s impoverished state."

These are complicated concepts for young artists, the idea that composition "leads the eye" through a picture or that simply rearranging elements on the picture plane can somehow provide information about the people in the picture that wasn't there before. But particularly engaged middle school student, and certainly a high school student would benefit from being introduced to these artistic concepts as part of their studio art instruction.