Waaaaay back in the day, when I decided to return to college while living in Arizona, I decided it would be smarter to spend a few years at Community College.
It was a smart decision. I saved a ton of money, and I actually learned some pretty valuable things in the art classes I took.
If you are thinking about going to art school, here’s what I suggest:
Take all the crap that you don’t want to take, but is required for your degree, at community college. I took all my Math, Science, & English classes there. Do you really want to pay hundreds of dollars per credit hour for those subjects when all you really want to do is doodle/paint/design?
Know that it’s going to suck, and deal with it.
To save your sanity, always, ALWAYS take at least one art class.
Even though it is not a formal art school, take the assignments in your class seriously. You’d be surprised at how valuable they are later on.
Numerous still life drawings (**SHUDDER**) : necessary.
Bring music and headphones. This helps when you actually want to work on an assignment in class, and your fellow students are talking about how their favorite thing “is, like, sneezing”.
These classes are cheap, yo. Take the opportunity to sign up for a class you wouldn’t normally take at art school. I took sculpture.
In one class, 2-D Design, we were regularly given project assignments that would make the class groan. I’ve kept many of these projects, and in retrospect I realize that grunt-work-like assignments are SO GOOD for awkward, naive art students.
For this project, we were required to make different markings on 100 cards. What?!?! A HUNDRED?? All different?!?
You know, it wasn’t that bad. Here we go:
Yeah. That’s a lotta marks.
We weren’t given much instruction as far as presentation of the cards, so I just put my collection together in a ghetto-fabulous book comprised of glue, string, duct tape, and butcher paper:
And I titled it, “Le Book de Rectangle Art”. ??????? I don’t know.
If I were an art teacher, I would totally give this assignment to my students. I would probably enjoy their reluctant groaning, too. Then I would say something like, “It builds character”.
What were the assignments that you fondly remember/wish never happened?
