IllustrationBachelor of Fine Arts

These are just a few the classes you will take as part of a comprehensive fine arts education.

• Foundation

  The Foundation program provides all entering students with a common first year experience that prepares them for a successful transition to their sophomore year and choice of major.

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• Calligraphic Drawing

  An introduction to drawing as representation through graphic symbols. Ways that the hand and its acquired cursive habits propel graphic representations and ideas are demonstrated. Through the in-depth study of a variety of precedents, the role that calligraphic dynamism and acuity play in stimulating observation and spurring inventiveness is established and experienced. Students’ own cursive habits are buoyed through free-hand copying and internalization of examples, and by applying them in both figure drawings and in on-site landscape drawings. Emphasis is also placed on formal creativity through the calligraphically propelled invention of scenes and objects.

• Narrative Drawing

  This seminar/studio course gives students the opportunity to study and apply modes of drawing that activate, rather than merely format, narrative. Through instructor presentations, readings, the close study of drawings, and through students’ own drawings graphic ideas are presented and explored for bringing pictorial elements into visual relationships that not merely relate, but also spark, narrative. A wide variety of narrative works from Renaissance Cycles to the modern graphic novel are studied in order to demonstrate how a drawing’s graphic or visual character, especially when novel or distinctive, creates thematic content and opens up new narrative domains. Students are afforded the opportunity, both through their own creative work and through special presentations on artists of their choosing, to enlarge the scope of the topic areas.

• Rapid-Pose Life Drawing

  Key figure drawing objectives are set in relation to the representation of a live model in briefly held poses. Pre-set figural templates, cursive and geometrical patterning as well as graphic symbols denoting plane, mass, and trajectory are deployed in rapid-response drawings.

• Printmaking – Relief and Intaglio

  Progressing from simple monochromatic and tonal parameters in both relief and intaglio, the course investigates color mixture in reduction relief prints and multi-plate intaglio prints. The goal is to examine color mood, color mixture, and color spatial readings in each. Methods include woodcut, linocut, drypoint, line etching, soft ground etching prints and aquatint. A final portfolio of five resolved images is the outcome. Repeatable for credit.