Pre-College

In this hands-on 2D Animation course, students learn fundamental techniques like character animation, timing, exaggeration, and storytelling through drawing, flipbooks, and storyboards. Class time includes animation analysis and creating QuickTime projects using pencil test software. By the end, students can animate dynamic characters. Field trips to the Walt Disney Family Museum, Exploratorium, local animation studios, or other locations are included. No prior experience is required.

Perfect for aspiring animators interested in character animation or visual effects. Learn the foundations of 3D animation rooted in traditional 2D techniques using Autodesk Maya. This course focuses on fundamental principles like squash and stretch, timing, and weight, with instructor demos and animation analysis. Students will create and critique QuickTime projects, receiving valuable feedback.

Using San Francisco as an extended studio, this course introduces students to architecture and interior design practice through making and experimentation, emphasizing a human-centered approach to design. You will learn how designers bring form and material to abstract concepts, generate architectural rhythms, and capture space and light through form. Students learn the necessary skills for communicating design ideas, using various techniques to prepare engaging and compelling design presentations.

Some ideas are best expressed in three dimensions. This course combines Ceramics, Sculpture, and Textiles for a 3D-focused fine arts all-day studio program. Students work across diverse disciplines, exploring the creative potential of cloth and string, clay, and plaster. While creating projects ranging from object-oriented pieces to experimental, time-based, and collaborative work, you explore conceptual approaches to sculpture to express ideas and issues.

This course is a hybrid workshop and seminar designed for first-time cartoonists, experienced visual storytellers, and anyone who loves reading and making comics. Students create and workshop original work by exploring page layouts, character design, story outlining, and visual art techniques. Students will learn publishing basics, including how to write pitches, self-publishing techniques for web and print, and historical aspects of comics' fascinating relationship with periodical and book publishing, past and present.

In this four-week course, students learn what it’s like to go to college for fashion design and work as a fashion designer. The studio will center on exploring drawing and rendering techniques, using a wide variety of illustration tools. The focus is on personal expression development and deepening an understanding of your unique drawing style while learning the skills needed to bring design ideas to fruition. Students will also learn to master sewing techniques, garment structures, and concepts for creating their own garments and clothing line.

This combined film and photography studio offers students an expanded opportunity to experiment with image making across both lens-based mediums of film and photography. Students will spend half the day working on projects focusing on film, then delve into photography in analog black and white, digital, and experimental processes. By the end of the course, you will have developed 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.

This hybrid workshop and seminar is designed for first-time game designers who want not just to play the games of today but to make the game art of tomorrow.

Through exploring theories of play and the structure of games, learning game design methodologies, and practicing the game development pipeline, students will create and playtest original works of digital game art and design. Students will be immersed in many facets of game design, including game mechanics, game animation and asset creation, worldbuilding, and interactive storytelling, and they will explore gaming’s relationship to traditional artistic practices and global culture beyond the board and screen.

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 visually conscious world. In this course, students explore the craft of drawing through class exercises, presentations of professional work, and group critiques. Progressing from dry media to watercolor and a mixed-media approach, you gain an understanding of the expressive and communicative possibilities of the many mediums available in an artist's arsenal. Illustration is paired with Drawing.

Who designs the everyday items in our lives: cell phones, athletic shoes, chairs, computers, cars, bikes, and wearable devices? Industrial and product designers! In this hands-on studio, you will learn and apply industrial and product design fundamentals: defining needs, sketching ideas, making physical models, and creating working prototypes that communicate your concepts with power, grace, and confidence

Students learn techniques for transforming sheets of metal into original works of art through understanding historical and contemporary uses of metal. Students develop a conceptual base to inform their aesthetics while learning the craft of metalsmithing. Specialized techniques such as sawing, texturing, forming, soldering, and finishing allow students to make sculptural objects and sophisticated pieces of jewelry. Throughout the course, you will practice design and fine artmaking strategies and learn to work with metal, torches, hand tools, and light machinery to make your ideas tangible.

In this studio, students learn the formal aspects of painting, from organizing the picture plane to mixing colors and exploring new ways of thinking about space, form, line, texture, pattern, and various approaches to applying paint. Class projects are primarily structured around observed subjects, such as the still life and the figure, but they also include exercises that pull from the imagination or expand into abstraction. Painting is paired with Drawing.

Interaction designers design and build meaningful and innovative experiences in all realms of work, lifestyle, and play. This introduction course will take a studio-based, collaborative, playful approach to learning about the Interaction Design field of building creative solutions for everyday problems. We will explore investigative research, systemic thinking, creative prototyping, and hands-on building. Our class projects will create through a number of different interactive canvases such as mobile, desktop, car, game console, kiosk, and apps.

In this studio, students will express concepts graphically, create visual metaphors, and learn the fundamentals of type design, integrating text with images while emphasizing both creativity and craft. You will learn the importance of planning, problem solving, communication and critical thinking as well as exploring the history and culture of Graphic Design. You will learn the basics of Adobe Creative Cloud (Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign), the software used by today's professional graphic designers, dividing their time between the design studio and the computer lab.