Art School Thread

Practice hard. Fuck animation school, the best school, the one I've wanted to go to since I was a teenager, Calarts, is just churning out faggotry nowadays. Just work hard and really stick to your own schedule. I recommend standing while animating too.

http://neilblr.com/post/58757345346

Use this too. AIM FOR EIGHT HOURS A DAY.

art school will fuck you dry. the only good thing out of it is forcing you to actually do something. It wont teach you anything. if you think you can force yourself to work day to day you are already better then fagots like me

>>2959669
Goddamn why am I not surprised Cicierega made an app like this.
Yeah back in the day CalArts was the dream but it's not really practical now to think I'll ever have a portfolio deemed 'worthy' by them, let alone the cost to go there.
Why standing though? I've yet to hear that one.

>>2959672
Keeps you focused, I find.

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>>2959673
That's interesting. Made me think about this too, when Williams preached about not listening to music while animating.

>>2959676
Good man. Don't falter. If you've got a waifu then now's a good time to get a picture of her printed and put it on the wall or on your desk and remind yourself often that you're doing it for her. If not for her then do it for yourself. You've got one life so don't waste it, if you can believe in yourself and keep those feelings close to you at all times, reminding yourself everyday so you never forget, then I know you can do it.

Having a classroom setting will certainly help push you, and a good teacher will alert you to things you didn't even know were wrong and tell you how to fix them. But actually going to college? Not really necessary anymore.

If you want to be an animator, LEARN HOW TO DRAW. Animation is 80% draftsmanship, 20% movement. Take life drawing and anatomy classes, either at a local school or online (if it's online, make sure it's critiqued).

As for animating, read The Animator's Survival Kit, Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair, and maybe The Illusion of Life. Do the exercises in order, starting with a pendulum, then the bouncing ball, etc. If you can, learn on paper so you won't be so focused on the tools. The local animation class at Who Cares Community College will probably have paper and light disks because it's cheaper than buying a bunch of programs. Once you think you've gotten the fundamentals, you can try Animate or Toon Boom or TVPaint.

Then just keep posting your stuff online. Studios barely hire from schools anymore; their recruiting people literally get paid to find out who's popular on tumblr and YouTube and the like.

>>2959679
Yeah man I've already let myself get too distracted. I can't lose sight of the end goal here.
Any reading material or other references you guys have found useful? I'll exclude what I've already read because I'm rusty and need to go through a lot of things a second or third time.

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Another thing is that I have always had a really bad tendency to mimic the styles of cartoons that I already enjoy. I can do it well, and this might help if I were to become a board artist on a project, but I need to break away from deriving content from other people's work. I can do life drawing just fine. I've already stopped drawing like this from screencaps and whatnot, but it's trying translate that technical knowledge I'm learning into a style that works easily with animation that fucks with me, and it's hard not to fall into another style I already know.

>>2959666

CalArts is garbage now.

Allison Schulnik, nuff said.

Obvs, it's your choice if you want to go to school for animation or not, but you should know that CalArts itself is more for story, not as much animation. I can say that being in that school environment is really great because of the people around you and being motivated to work with your peers every day. It's not like they hold some secret to drawing better, but they're really good about making every resource available to you and I think they try to teach more like an approach/ a way of thinking when creating your work.

Another bonus to going to a big name art school is networking, like yeah you can meet people online, but it's not the same as seeing the director, of a movie you love, speak in person, then being like facebook friends after. Personally, I love it and I'm glad I took the opportunity, but it's not for everyone.

Are you trying to going into storyboarding or the actual animation though? They're two pretty different sets of skills depending on which you want to try for. Like storyboarding, you could almost get away with drawing stick figures as long the story is clear, so draftsmanship isn't quite as important. You'd want to read up more on story structure with like, Carl Jung's Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Hero's Journey, Invisible Ink, and watch a LOT of film. For animation it's a lot more important to have good draftsmanship most of the time. The books that >>2959680 mentioned are good. But you'll also have a tougher time with the actual animation for TV because most of it is done in Korea or Vancouver.

OP it's pretty obvious you're 15 or really young. animation is outsourced to asians who make .03c a scene.

>goes to art school

>2017

never gonna make it

>>2959878
>shitposts on /ic/
>thinks he'll make it

Yeah, you tell 'em!

>>2959669
Not OP but I'm doing general media production undergrad (undergrad just in animation would be utterly useless unless you're some hyper-lucky mother who gets a job right out of college) and it would be incredible if I could go to Gobelins's English MA after. Calarts only graduate animation is experimental which sounds real memey.

>>2960079
It really does. "experimental" is always a huge red flag.

>>2959743
>story boarding or actual animation?
I mean, I'd like to learn the fundamentals of animation, I won't need to learn how to animate anything terribly complicated, just enough to be able to make some shorts or something in the meantime. I should probably put more focus on storyboarding and writing right now though because it's where I have the least experience. I'd also like to get better at background painting and obviously still work on my general drawing skill.
But I don't know man just having something put together enough to slap on Youtube would be totally satisfying, even if no one noticed it.

M-Morty *buuurp* morty art school *braaaaap* morty art school sucks. *burp* read a book morty

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>>2959666
>the "in the current year, I have to go to a big art school/CalArts/whatever to make it" meme: debunked
People's underage/brainlet status shows when they unironically believe this. That's like how every halfway decent musician in high school says "I wanna go to Berklee/Juilliard!! XD". These schools are scams at this point. They know how good of a name they have, so they get away with accepting everyone and forcing you and hundreds of scrubs like you to pay fucking abhorrent amounts of money to attend without little to no scholarship/financial aid. And if you're not the best of the best of the best going in, you're going to be literally nobody there. You won't be in the top classes/art groups/whatever, so you won't be getting nearly the level of training that your more talented peers are. Those big names that the school advertises as faculty will hardly give you the time of day.

>b-but muh networking
Once again, if you're not a top-tier artist or if you don't have a good personality, you're not going to get networking done at a school like this, you're going to get blacklisted. Who would want to work with you when Chadrick Thunderbrush is at the same school, worlds better than the literally who that is you, and available for hire?

With the internet there is so little reason to spend hundreds of thousands on schooling for art. Get a job that can sustain you while leaving enough time for practicing/studying. Pick up books from the art book thread, take lessons from a nearby professional artist if you can, study a lot, take some classes at the local community college. Send emails to your favorite animators/whatever and ask for advice, garner knowledge on how to sell yourself. Once you've actually reached a presentable level of quality, start making yourself known on various social media and start putting works out. Keep your eyes peeled and ask around your art peers for chances at collaboration, commission, etc.

>>2959669
This program is horrifying.

>>2959666
People don't go to school to learn, they go to school to push themselves and make connections. And guess how out of the people who have TV shows, how many of them are CalArts graduates? And guess how many more people working in the industry are there thanks to their teacher passing their name along?

Every good artist who goes to art school always bitches that they weren't taught enough because they fail to understand art school in particular was not there to make them Renaissance level but to get them work for years to come.

The ironic part is that with the amount of debt they'll have their first decade of working is going to be spent paying it off.

You can get into it on your own even without school. I've never taken an art class in my life, learned everything online. Through my channel on youtub, with my animation alone i've been offered jobs at several studios, including rick and morty.

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You don't need college, you need these:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYOBCjdAoAjbKsk4NG7h_WJ9CX7F5zfUe

AMB is kind of a goof (and he has little experience with formal illustration so you'll note his "drawings" aren't great) but I feel he has the most exhaustive animation instruction content on perhaps the entire internet. Apart from his voluminous free content on youtube his "livestream library" is nearing 30 hours of topical material (and is expanding by the week) and is only $100 USD.

Pair that with this:

bitey.com/fx

Adam Phillips is a former Disney special effects animator who made his own animation course. Each "project" is apportioned out on a weekly basis and I can guarantee it's some of the best instruction you'll get on the subject.

These two combined are less than $500 (assuming you even pay for the Live Stream library and don't just make use of AMB's generous free content) and will take you very far if animation is your goal.

>>2959697
You don't appear to be mimicking a style so much as you're copying pre-existing images directly from observation. I want to emphasize that there is nothing wrong with that per se, it's a part of the growing process when it comes to drawing, but to be an animator or at least anywhere near a good one you will have to have a very strong ability to draw from imagination and a good understanding of formal anatomy, construction, proportion and other concepts like that. You can find many of the books mentioned thus far that teach these concepts (and then some) here:

https://mega.nz/#F!es1BSKQR!spODyd0iaQmMelGA2GscFw

>>2960713
> if you're not a top-tier artist or if you don't have a good personality, you're not going to get networking done at a school like this
Yeah duh, that's how it is inside of literally every school. And its not about a good personality or being a top tier artist, people who are social socialize and people who have the drive to "get gud" do so, and teachers notice that. If you want to be that creepy kid in the back that no one talks to like you were in high school then you aren't going to make it anywhere, it won't matter if you're great or not if you dont socialize.

I know someone who is currently going to the east-coast version of CalArts (SVA) and they are on the deans list currently and come consistently in the top 10% of their classes and I would say the only difference between her and her piers is that she isn't taking the price tag of the school lightly and taking advantage of all of the assets at the school as she can AND she talks to her piers, both learning from them and networking with the good ones.

>With the internet there is so little reason to spend hundreds of thousands on schooling for art
I agree with that whole paragraph of yours actually, everything you suggested is obtainable and reasonable for someone who wants to work hard at becoming an animator. BUT you could still do those things whole going to art school. Granted you would be doing them a lot less, especially if you are taking a full load of classes, but some of what you suggested is integrated into most art programs

I think people who try to "debunk" art school are either poor and sad that they cant go to a ridiculously expensive art school, or they are someone with the money who DID go and either was lazy and thought success would be handed to them or actually tried but wasn't cut out for the stress/workload/whatever of college and buckled.

tl;dr: if you are very very self motivated and can network, then college is a scam and not worth your time. if not, then college is good