Marwen

Study, sketch, and sculpt the human torso! You’ll learn to work with wire to build full-scale torso sculptures with your classmates. Then it's time to get your hands dirty—you’ll further develop your sculpting skills while working on an individual torso in clay and finish it with painted glazes. No experience is required!

Here’s your opportunity to get your hands dirty. You’ll explore numerous hand-building techniques then work your way to the potter’s wheel. You’ll learn the process of preparing clay, wedging, centering, and “throwing” functional and non-functional pottery. You’ll create cylinders, vessels, cups, and bowls, and you’ll finish your work by using various glazing methods and surface treatments to decorate your art pieces.

Sculpture is no longer reserved only for wood, stone, bronze, clay, or other traditional media. You’ll be introduced to traditional art techniques and also to new ideas in sculpture by the artists who are setting the current trends. You’ll combine  traditional media with soft materials, found objects, photography, photo projections, drawings, or paintings, creating two and three-dimensional sculptural forms.

This drawing course offers you an opportunity to grow your drawing skills through the observational studies of still life. Using ink on paper, you’ll take progressive steps in understanding formal issues of drawing such as composition, value, and the interpretation of shape. 

This course emphasizes the development of eye, mind, and hand coordination in drawing skills. You’ll experiment with drawing mediums, materials, and techniques. You’ll develop observational drawing skills and work with still-life objects as you use your sketchbook as a tool for study and skill development. 

This course challenges the traditional modes of constructing and claiming images. Through reworking and transforming images over time and through process-oriented mutative drawing, you’ll learn what kinds of discoveries can happen. This course uses mixed media and a variety of approaches to picture making. You, as well as your artwork, will leave this course transformed.

Two main ingredients make up a good painting, composition and dynamic colors. In this course you’ll learn how to create a composition that will draw the viewer in and won’t let go. You’ll explore how to mix acrylic paints to generate dynamic colors. Then you’ll create collages and clay objects using your favorite colors. For the final project, you’ll make a painting from observation by combining both your collages and objects. 

In this course you’ll explore the technique of watercolor painting as you create paintings that tell stories. Create abstract and realistic paintings from stories, dreams, or ideas from your own imaginations.

You’ll photograph people, places, and objects for each letter of the alphabet to create your own photo book. Through this process you’ll learn how to work through a single project from beginning to end, all the while developing many different photography and compositional skills.

In this course, you’ll be introduced to the analogue process of black and white darkroom photography. Learn all the functions of a manual camera, such as aperture, shutter speed, and focus, as well as darkroom fundamentals. Indoor studio lighting will be introduced in this course using tungsten light kits and strobe flash kits. In addition, you’ll learn how to enhance mood in our staged studio shots with an eye to Hollywood’s Film Noir era of the 1940s and 50s.

How can a photographer make creative pictures when there is less light in the winter months? In this course you’ll explore different ways of making images with or without sunlight. You’ll take pictures outside using grainy high-speed film, use objects and lights to take pictures indoors, and make images in the darkroom without even using a camera! Whether or not you’ve used a camera before, you’ll learn new ways to make pictures.

Lighting is an essential part of photography. In this course you’ll learn to use conventional and unconventional lighting methods to create and capture dynamic images. There is no better way to improve the quality of your photographs than to gain an understanding of how light works and the effective ways to use it in your image making. You’ll produce more effective and consistent results using natural, ambient, and found light sources as well as professional studio lighting. You’ll photograph people as well as objects, creating bodies of work that reflect contemporary styles and trends.

In this course, you’ll open up new ways of thinking about working with image, form, and sound that will lead to interesting art pieces. You’ll learn and work with basic digital audio production skills while experimenting with sound as a physical medium. Invent ways of translating images and sculptures into music and sound, making music based on what an image might mean or what a mood suggests. You’ll create sound pieces and music based on characteristics of an image such as color, composition, and geometry. You can take this course even if you’ve never played an instrument or recorded music.

Animate using only a computer and your imagination as your tools. You’ll learn how to use Flash and Adobe Photoshop to create your own animation. This course will build your confidence using the computer as an animation tool as well as your ability to breathe life into digital characters and objects.

In this course you’ll use origami, papier-mâché, sewing, and assemblage sculpture techniques to make historically-based dolls from many world cultures. For your final piece you’ll create your own self-portrait dolls and toys.

Explore prints, patterns, and graphics in fashion. Learn surface design techniques such as stenciling, block printing, fabric painting, dying, and repeated pattern making. You’ll print images on T-shirts as well as design, print, and paint on fabrics that you’ll use for garment construction.

In this course you’ll explore contemporary urban art through multi-disciplinary projects such as stylized writing, color combination and balance, while also utilizing mixed media. Throughout each project, you’ll incorporate your own original designs and perspective, and you’ll be able to use all the techniques that you’ve learned in order to complete an individual final, stylized letter concept.