Pre-College

In this hands-on course, you’ll dive into the foundations of 2D animation—character movement, timing, exaggeration, and storytelling—through drawing, flipbooks, and storyboards. Build technical skills through individual and group projects, explore animation analysis, and create QuickTime projects using pencil test software. By the end, you’ll be animating dynamic characters. Field trips may include the Walt Disney Family Museum, Exploratorium, and local animation studios, showing you how the pros make it happen.

Perfect for aspiring animators interested in character animation or visual effects, this course introduces the core principles of 3D animation, grounded in traditional 2D techniques, using Autodesk Maya. Learn squash and stretch, timing, and weight through instructor demos and project critiques. You’ll develop original QuickTime projects and receive feedback to sharpen your skills. Field trips to the Walt Disney Family Museum, Exploratorium, and Bay Area studios give you a behind-the-scenes view of the industry.

Using San Francisco as an extended studio, you’ll explore architecture and interior design through making, experimentation, and a human-centered approach to design. Discover how designers bring abstract ideas to life with form and material, generate rhythms, and capture space and light through form. You’ll also build skills in research, observation, drawing, and 3D modeling to communicate your design ideas. Field trips and private tours of firms and showrooms help you see and imagine what a future in design can look like.

Some ideas are best expressed in three dimensions. In this course, you’ll work across diverse disciplines like ceramics, sculpture, and textiles—exploring the creative potential of cloth, clay, string, and plaster. Projects range from object-based works to experimental, time-based, and collaborative pieces. You’ll be encouraged to push the boundaries of traditional and nontraditional materials as you explore conceptual approaches to sculpture. Field trips to San Francisco museums and public art sites highlight the Bay Area’s rich public art scene and give you fresh inspiration.

This hybrid workshop and seminar is designed for anyone who loves reading or making comics, from first-time cartoonists to experienced visual storytellers. Explore page layouts, character design, story outlining, and visual art techniques as you create original work. You’ll learn the publishing basics—from writing pitches to self-publishing for web and print—while uncovering the rich history of comics. Field trips and guest artists highlight San Francisco’s dynamic comics scene.

Get a feel for what it’s like to study fashion in college and work as a fashion designer. In this studio, you’ll develop your personal drawing style, exploring illustration and rendering techniques with a variety of tools. Learn sewing methods, garment structures, and design concepts to create your own pieces and a clothing line collection. Guest fashion designers, industry professionals, and field trips for sourcing and inspiration help you envision where your creativity and style can take you.

Experiment with two lens-based mediums in this combined studio. Spend half your time making films and the other half exploring photography—black and white analog, digital, and experimental. Screenings, critiques, and research fuel your projects as you develop your own artistic voice. Field trips to museums like SFMOMA and explorations around San Francisco inspire your work. By the end, you’ll have a portfolio of images in a variety of mediums, a set of small handmade magazines, and the ability to think critically about and articulate the power of images and image making.

Step into the world of game design by studying the games of today and imagining the ones of tomorrow. Learn the theories of play, design methodologies, and the game development pipeline as you create and playtest original works with Unity software. Explore mechanics, animation, worldbuilding, and interactive storytelling, while considering games’ connections to art and culture. In a collaborative, community-focused studio, you’ll also learn from guest artists and attend field trips to expand your view of what games can be.

From magazine covers to children’s books, posters, fashion drawings, animated characters, movie storyboards, graphic novels, and web images, the work of an illustrator is everywhere in our visual world. In this course, you’ll explore the craft of illustration through hands-on exercises, professional examples, and group critiques. Progress from dry media to watercolor and mixed media as you discover new expressive possibilities and mediums.

You’ll also study drawing as a foundation for artistic expression, focusing on gesture, perspective, contour, and spatial awareness. Experiment with a range of media—from charcoal and graphite to sumi brush and ink wash—while strengthening creative perception and hand-eye coordination. Visits to San Francisco’s galleries and museums will give you fresh ideas and new perspectives.

Ever wonder who designs cell phones, sneakers, chairs, computers, bikes, or wearable devices? Industrial and product designers do. In this hands-on studio, you’ll learn to define needs, sketch ideas, and build models and prototypes that communicate your concepts with impact. You’ll explore the full product lifecycle, including sustainability and circular economies, and think about how design affects both people and the planet. Field trips to cutting-edge design firms such as IDEO, Lunar, or fuseproject bring the process into focus and show you what it’s like to work in the field.

Learn to transform sheets of metal into original works of art while exploring both historic and contemporary approaches to using metal. Build a conceptual foundation for your designs while developing skills in metalsmithing techniques like sawing, soldering, forming, and finishing. Work with metal, torches, and hand tools to bring your ideas to life and make sculptural objects and sophisticated pieces of jewelry. Guest artists and field trips will show you how to blend entrepreneurship and creative practice.

In this studio, you’ll learn the formal aspects of painting—organizing the picture plane, mixing colors, and exploring space, form, line, texture, pattern, and various approaches to applying paint. Projects center on observation-based work, such as still life and figure studies, while also encouraging imagination and abstraction.

The drawing component introduces you to core expressive skills like gesture, proportion, perspective, contour, and spatial awareness through studies of natural and human-made objects. You’ll explore line, shape, texture, composition, and abstraction using a range of media—including charcoal, graphite, Conté crayon, sumi brush, ink wash, and oil stick—while strengthening hand-eye coordination and creative perception. Visits to San Francisco galleries and museums enhance your studio experience.

Explore how to design and build meaningful, innovative human experiences for work, play, and everyday life. In this collaborative hands-on studio, you’ll practice investigative research, design thinking, prototyping, and creative problem-solving. Projects focus on building interactive user interfaces and experiences for platforms like mobile, desktop, car, game console, kiosk, and apps. Along the way, you’ll gain both technical skills and creative confidence. Guest speakers and field trips connect you to San Francisco’s design-tech industry and show you what’s possible as a professional.

Express concepts visually, create visual metaphors, and learn the fundamentals of type design while integrating text and image with creativity and craft. In this studio, you’ll build critical skills in planning, communication, and problem-solving as well as explore the history and culture of graphic design today. Learn the basics of Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign)—the software used by professional designers—working between the studio and computer lab. Guest speakers and field trips offer fresh perspectives on how communication design drives ideas into action.