Overlooked Art Class?
2yr
What is an overlooked or underrated art class you have taken that you would recommend to all art students?
Physical health of the artist
The posture we should maintain sitting or standing, what stretching we can do before and after to help the back muscles.
What care we should take with our eyes after a long day of study.
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2yr
Art History!
We're often so deep into the practice and the techniques that art history can become secondary in our interests - but, personally, I think it's essential that we get to know and understand how art changed through time and continues to change. At least, for me, this has been a big deal! :)
I've just started Patrick Jones "How to draw Fantasy Female Figures." I'm learning it alongside Stans Figure drawing course. Patricks more intuitive approach provides an excellent counterpoint to Stans technically grounded lessons.
Drapery classes like from New Masters Academy, Hogarth, or Bridgeman, seem sorely needed in more art education. Would be neat seeing more courses in how to paint clothing, perhaps going into the styles of Leyendecker, Cornwell, and even fashion illustrators. Another course type I think a lot of art education should teach more of is material studies. Like Jonathan Hardesty of Schoolism has an awesome course going into tons of material properties. Would like to see some more standardized looks into the properties of color/light and how to train your eye to look at different materials.
Artwod, Dynamic Sketching or Spacial Awareness Training whatever you want to call it, it's basically perspective but teached and applied in a way where you are forced to really learn the useful stuff.
A lot of people learn about drawing a cube in 1, 2 or 3 point perspective with a ton of guidelines and think that that is enough for everything else even though there is so much more to it like twisting, rotating, tilting and combining everything together for stuff like figures or creatures is super important because only after learning these things you really "get" how useful it is.
After understanding that it is so much easier to learn other fundamentals like Anatomy and Values it almost feels like a shortcut, if you want to get good fast than thats what you need to learn.
Modelism, even if it's not really an "art" class... as in "trying to rebuild an object from scratch and understanding it". Meaning you do have to "tear down" something for real or get a functional plan, then assemble all pieces it into one.
I always though it would be useless and only "seeing" the external would be enough until we were tasked with re-creating functional objects starting from cardboard.
It just force you to think in very different terms and make your intelligence assemble everything like in a puzzle, memorize and assimilate much much better.
It also teach patience which is a great skill to develop :)