Art by Aaron Painter
The path to professional illustration takes a lot of learning, a lot of hard work, and sometimes plenty of detours. This week, Jake Parker, Lee White, and Will Terry discuss the merits of the traditional four year art degree, the shortcomings of “foundations” courses at traditional colleges, and the importance of vetting your illustration professors. Can you get all the value of a four year degree in two years instead? Can you cut away the fluff from a college curriculum? There’s also a deep dive on the essential skills you need to display in your foundations portfolio.
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WHAT IS A FOUNDATION?
A lot of our listeners and students have some college education, some have none, many are self taught -- what are the foundations needed for ALL students? These are the three main models of foundations for illustration students.
The student with no foundation who just dives into illustration
Moderate foundation, some figure drawing classes and 2D design classes.
Dedicated Art School, robust foundation with a ton of classes.
Will went to BYU (PYT) and the foundations were not great. It was 2 years of 12 classes. They weren’t specific classes to his major. He spent a lot of time drawing which didn’t really help him a great deal because it was not targeted to his goals.
Jake went to Mesa Community College and took a life drawing class, a color theory class, a watercolor class, and a couple others. That was his official structured schooling but he dropped out to take a job in animation. A great deal of what he learned was from other professionals in the industry. His original plan was to get an associate’s degree at MCC and get a portfolio to get him into ArtCenter. He had a rough idea of what he wanted to do in his career. Most of Jake’s learning has been self directed, learning from other people. It took him around 10 years to learn what he could have learned in 5 or 3 or 2. Jake has never touched oils and has only painted in acrylics once or twice, and works almost entirely digitally -- he might have had dabbled with paint more if he had stayed in school but his color theory and composition skills are significantly better because he focused down on those instead.
Lee went to a school in Laguna Beach before he went to ArtCenter. The school was very Realism focused, and so his early schooling was just doing Realism with traditional media. This didn’t have much to do with his goals in illustration, though, so Lee bailed. There was a very clear correlation between the foundation courses of that school (realism) and the end product that senior students were delivering (high level realism work). Is it possible for foundations courses to change the trajectory of their students? ArtCenter had a robust foundations course with a bootcamp style, in which students didn’t have the chance to consider what they were doing. It should have been possible to pare down the course time to what each student wanted to learn specifically. A lot of the student’s work ended up looking like their teacher’s work.
EVALUATING THE FOUNDATIONS SYSTEMS
1. Classes don’t relate to one another.
Because different teachers teach different courses, the knowledge becomes compartmentalized with no clear goal in sight. The outcome is no longer important because the individual lessons had different focuses. It’s a solution in search of a problem. Life drawing, light and shadow, these are important things that students should know but actual application of these things are NOT taught at schools, and are things you tend to learn when working. You do learn certain things but there is no A + B = C, just As and Bs, knowledge in isolation.
Life drawing is a leftover relic because what you’re supposed to get out of it is no longer taught. They setup the model and the lights, and you’re encouraged to look at proportion, which is necessary, but it gets stuck at proportion, shadow, shape, and light shapes. When you’re done, you can go into a figure drawing session and impress people, but you can’t necessarily draw the human form in an illustration from one’s imagination. Will once did take a class that had the models posed as a finished illustration, in costume, which narrowed the divide between the abstract skill and the concrete skill. This sort of training over time does shift people towards drawing realism, BUT the alternative, drawing in a highly stylized manner, can cripple the illustrator if they don’t learn traditional drawing skills first. In narrative illustration, there is too much complexity needed that if you don’t learn how to draw well, you will get stuck in trying to solve every problem in the same way. You can tell when an illustrator has a simple, shape-oriented style but can also draw extremely well:
You can also tell when illustrators are trying to hide bad drawing skills behind stylization.
Life drawing can be a good step because it trains your eye to see how forms connect into each other, but the next step should be life fabrication, in which you come up with poses based on the anatomy that you understand. A design principles class about the rule of thirds, the psychology of shapes, composition, etc. would be very useful, although most of the time it is taught on the side.
ANNA DAVISCOURT CHARACTER DRAWING COURSE: Coming Soon!
The fact that there is no direct link between figure drawing and anything else means that a lot of students could get really good at the shorthand of figure drawing, but not anything else. Lee once tried to draw a Vespa Scooter using his knowledge from figure drawing but it failed spectacularly, so he took industrial design courses to supplement the gap in his knowledge.
A lot of the people in Lee’s figure drawing classes got really good at it and got a lot of attention for it but then lagged behind as everyone moved onto other things and left figure drawing behind. There were outliers though.
The exercise became the end result for some people, so be careful that you don’t get trapped in it. Some people get so good at life drawing that everything they do afterwards has a flavor of life drawing in it.
Everyone can do life drawing, maybe 1 out of 100 do it so well that you actually want to look at it, your work and imagination outside of life drawing matter a lot more.
2. Everyone has to take the same classes.
You could be sitting next to a sculpture major or a photography major in your foundations classes. They want to give everyone a basic understanding of illustration, even though photography and graphic design students didn’t care about it. Illustration students became complacent because they were ahead of the curve in that class but needed to realize they weren’t competing against those students. There just isn’t time for a comprehensive illustration education in 4 years.
Part of your grade is filling a sketchbook. They don’t have to be good, there just have to be 100 of them. This was rough on painters who were great in their medium but were not used to pens or pencils.
3. Teachers are sometimes unqualified.
The teachers sometimes don’t do illustration professionally and possibly might not even be able to find work outside of the university. Art schools rely on adjunct faculty, professionals who want to be philanthropic with their time. They pay them a small amount of money but not nearly what they are worth. Sometimes they attract these amazing teachers for a few years or more. Often they quit when they realize they aren’t paid enough or for other reasons, and so the school scrambles to find someone to fill the class. This person may not be prepared or have the specific background to teach the class, and the quality of the class can go down overnight.
Jake went from a full time visiting professor to adjunct due to not having his paperwork in order and his drop in pay was drastic. He asked how people afford to do those kinds of jobs, and was told it was primarily three kinds of people:
Semi-retired professionals who want to give back to the school or community.
People who want to move into a full time position, and adjunct is their foot in the door.
People who just need cash, when no work is coming in and they need a paycheck.
Jake didn’t fit any of those categories and left. It was part of the impetus to starting SVSLearn.com, which gives him more control and freedom.
Some classes take 2 years to get into the curriculum. You don’t always know who is going to teach the class. One time Lee was teaching a quick sketch class, and the notes and curriculum he received from the previous faculty were absurd -- it was like a Pictionary class in which the students were asked to scramble to draw something. Lee was laid off along with most of the faculty but the classes were still supposed to run, so they hired someone with zero experience and just asked Lee for all of his notes and curriculum.
There are great foundations teachers and great adjunct professors -- we aren’t trying to bag on everyone. Students should take stock of who’s teaching them, make sure that person is the one you can learn the most from in that place and time. Your education no longer rests solely on them, you have access to the internet, online courses, books, Patreon tutorials, Gumroad tutorials, etc. There is so much you can learn, the problem is parsing the order of learning things and that takes guidance. This is one of the main reasons SVSLearn created the foundations courses.
There are some great foundations teachers that are transformative and amazing. We can’t write all of them off. Will has a lot of friends who are great teachers in art schools, and they are truly great, but the system itself has weaknesses. There are teachers who have launched their students to great careers and they should be respected.
4. The foundations courses are too general and it’s impossible to fix that.
“If there’s one thing you could change to make our school program better, what would it be?” Make foundations specific to illustration. The schools know this is crucial but they cannot do it because of the budget required. They know it already but can’t do anything about it. If students want to go into comic books, they would need a whole new curriculum and set of professors and classrooms, resources, etc, just for that track. Out of 100 students, maybe 10 would want to go to comics, 20 to illustration, and there just isn’t enough resources for meeting student’s needs.
The system itself is the weak point, not the individuals within it.
Jake would be teaching a character design course and maybe 5 of the students would be great at it and 20 would just need to be retaught fundamentals.
ESSENTIALS FOR EVERY FOUNDATIONS PORTFOLIO
This is applicable for everyone no matter where you are, self directed studying or at a university.
You need a good foundation because a good foundation gives you options when you pick a major and then when you go out into the real world. Jake, Lee and Will all have their irons in a lot of fires, with A interests, B interests, and C interests that all pay and sustain their career.
Don’t let your style be a mask for your limitations. You should be able to draw in different ways depending on the situation. Don’t use your style as an excuse to not draw something difficult or different.
1. The Ability to Move Objects in Space With Consistency, and the Ability to Draw Complex Shapes in Different Perspectives.
Lee White's Drawing of Jake’s Robot
2. The Ability to Design Cohesive Worlds Which Consist of Environments, Vehicles and Characters.
Everything should look like it belongs to the same world and you should be able to change that up project to project. Just drawing characters without vehicles, props, and environments is not enough. You should have the ability to change depending on what the project calls for.
3. Having a Good Understanding of Design and Composition.
How do you know if you have this, and how do you learn it? What is it? It would be good to sit someone down for a semester and just teach them design principles and how the rules apply in different situations.
Will tried this as a design class at UVU and then made it into Creative Composition at SVSLearn.com.
WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEACHER?
Is it okay to ask to see your teacher’s work in a foundations class? If you don’t know anything about them, and haven’t googled them beforehand, you’re getting what you’re asking for essentially. Lee once asked this of a professor and the professor was shocked because he hadn’t been asked in years, and he hadn’t done any work in years either.
Ask your teacher to demo, because if they don’t want to do that, it’s a big red flag. Lee once asked a teacher to demo in a figure drawing class and she couldn’t do it.
Great teachers might not be great illustrators and vice versa. A great teacher should be great at their craft, want to help others, and want to teach to the point of being excited about breaking down their processes. It’s so hard to hire a good illustration teacher because of this.
CLOSING REMARKS
If you’re going through a foundations program right now:
Train your weakness, not your strength. It may be ugly but it’s worth it.
Don’t become a technique warrior. Make interesting images without becoming obsessed with technicalities.
At least once a year, put something out into the world that you love and that you worked on. This will show you where your strengths and your weaknesses are, and it ups the stakes a lot.
We’ve been thinking about this because we have rebuilt our foundations course on SVSLearn.com and have geared it towards illustrators specifically.
https://www.svslearn.com/foundations
What should be in a portfolio? We reverse engineered the perfect portfolio and based our foundations curriculum around that. You start learning basic drawing skills and, by the end of it, you should have a portfolio piece from each class. Your portfolio might not be fully fleshed out, but you will have a very strong foundation.
SUMMARY
Foundations courses at traditional colleges are often limited and way too general.
Professors are often unqualified because of the way the higher education machine works.
Developing a good foundation and real drawing skills is crucial to working professionally.
Build a strong portfolio and learn the foundational skills to transition to whatever kind of work comes your way.
LINKS
Jake Parker: mrjakeparker.com. Instagram: @jakeparker, Youtube: JakeParker44
Will Terry: willterry.com. Instagram: @willterryart, Youtube: WillTerryArt
Lee White: leewhiteillustration.com. Instagram: @leewhiteillo
Alex Sugg: alexsugg.com
Aaron Painter: painterdraws.com. Instagram: @painterdraws
Daniel Tu: danieltu.co
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