This course is a short introduction to the use of game engines for the production of realistic interactive environments-- whether for architecture, industrial design, VR, or animation. The class is intended for people who are already comfortable with 3D modeling and texturing and will cover the basics of scene creation, modeling, the particular requirements of PBR texturing, animation, and simple interactivity through the use of blueprints. Topics will include basic setup; import of 3D assets, including materials, animations, polygonal models, and custom hit-detection meshes; setup of input methods, lighting, sky-boxes, and atmospherics; and output to various devices. Professional workflow considerations and naming conventions will be covered, as well as an overview of useful third-party software for modeling and texturing.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

This course is a short introduction to the use of game engines for the production of realistic interactive environments-- whether for architecture, industrial design, VR, or animation. The class is intended for people who are already comfortable with 3D modeling and texturing and will cover the basics of scene creation, modeling, the particular requirements of PBR texturing, animation, and simple interactivity through the use of blueprints. Topics will include basic setup; import of 3D assets, including materials, animations, polygonal models, and custom hit-detection meshes; setup of input methods, lighting, sky-boxes, and atmospherics; and output to various devices. Professional workflow considerations and naming conventions will be covered, as well as an overview of useful third-party software for modeling and texturing.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

The first core studio in the program is centered on an investigation of the mechanics of articulating meaning in an image. Through a variety of projects, students will investigate the efficacy of various strategies in traditional and new media, and engage in perceptual experiments in order to study the intersection of art and visual psychology.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This seminar addresses key critical theory and socio-political aspects of illustration practices from a historical perspective. Reading, discussion, and meaningful integration of ideas into studio writing and activity are goals of the course. Class will meet two times per week including supported research times in various special collections and the library. Faculty determine the content of the seminar each term, balancing attention to issues defined by the expertise and interests of the graduate cohort and subjects of relevance to the field and professional practice. Theorists of special concern to contemporary illustration practice will be highlighted; statistics and technical information about communication media will illuminate how art objects have circulated in their own eras. Critical reading, writing, and presentation will be assessed.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00 - $75.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In this class, we will explore multiple forms of graphic storytelling. Though the primary lens of this class is comics/graphic novel storytelling, we will range outside of that as well. We will work with multiple forms of sequential narrative, and we will also experiment with scale and medium. Can you make a graphic narrative that is tiny and fits in the palm of a child's hand? Can you make one so large you need to walk through it, be immersed in it, stand inside of it? Can you make a visual story out of jewelry, or clay? Can a room be a graphic narrative? We will hone both writing and visual skills to create narratives in all mediums. The class will also include readings in graphic narrative, and some exploration of film, from both a writing and cinematography standpoint.

The goal is to create multiple short visual narratives over the course of the semester, culminating in a larger project.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

This studio elective - open to all RISD graduate students regardless of departmental affiliation-will address rotating topics and modes of making, thinking and discourse every semester. The structure and content of this course is designed to shift, enabling different topical investigations and a variety of expert faculty teaching special content in fall and spring of each year. This enables the flexibility for studio consideration of an ever-changing range of both topics and studio engagement. This course may be repeated for elective credit with permission of a student's graduate program director (GPD).

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

This course delves into Illustration as a contextualized practice through study and analysis of illustrated exemplars held in the Special Collections at RISD Fleet Library, the Hay and the John Carter Brown Libraries at Brown University, and the Providence Athenµum. First-hand encounters with these materials and subsequent secondary research into the causes and conditions of their publication will help to illuminate the role of illustration in influencing opinion, and ultimately the shaping of societies. Seminar discussions will center on the nature of publishing in historic and contemporary contexts and consider the diverse ways that visual rhetoric circulates in culture, and is further mediated in institutional and cultural settings. Expository writing practice is key to this research seminar. Facilitated through our object-based study and under the guidance of faculty and Special Collections research librarians, students will develop several short essays and a final project in the form of a research document or format suitable for display. A final work summary will be part of a self-assessment prepared by the student. This assessment will be helpful in preparing documentation for the final Thesis required in this MFA program.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

A defining aspect of human consciousness is creation of meaning through the construction of narrative- a particularly potent mode of communication because it conveys information in a way that allows us to empathetically imagine the lives of others. Beyond the limitations of facts, polemic or data narrative entrances, narrative entertains and enriches us. As such, it is a basic element of Illustration. This class seeks to examine why and how stories matter in the context of traditional and contemporary world culture. We will explore how story construction, narrative voice, imagery, and choice of media intersect to create meaning and reach various audiences. We will look a broad scope of narrative strategies (linear, symbolic, interactive, etc.) from the revelations of the handmade artist's book to cutting-edge technology that is shaping narrative and its reception.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course will deal with critical understandings of visual culture, narrative, and the melding of written and visual languages in contemporary graphic texts. We will begin with a study of visual culture, and some of the key issues, ideas, and questions that underlie thinking about visuality: its spaces and places; the politics of representation; theories of the spectator/audience; modes of reproduction and circulation of texts in the era of digitization and globalization. We will then consider theories of narratology, as they are particularly useful to a study of the graphic medium. For the final weeks of the semester, we will move to a consideration of some of the rich and varied criticism from within the field of comics studies.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $260.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In his 1909 An Essay in Aesthetics, Roger Fry talks about the moral purpose of art-to offer viewers the opportunity to experience emotion with objectivity. Rather than actually witnessing a terrible accident in a train station, in a film we are able to experience the event and its associated emotions without the urgency of response required if it were truly happening before us. We are able to feel and to observe ourselves feeling. While Fry was focusing on the experience of visual art, his description of purpose is precisely applicable to the writing of narrative fiction. The ultimate goal of storytelling is to share an experience or another world with a reader, and the focal point of that experience is the conjuring of emotion. This course will focus on the development of understanding and facility in the creation of emotion in fiction. We will address the basic structures of plot and conflict and move directly to the creation of work that will be presented in workshop. The discussion will focus on the writer's intent: their goals for the emotional and narrative experience for the reader.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course is predicated on deep student focus on social engagement and the societal benefits attached to their studio work. Students will investigate and critique methodologies of contemporary, socially engaged artists to develop their own progressive work in order to question and shift traditionally narrow and restrictive paradigms in Illustration that preference and reward the hegemonic at the expense of the progressive, dissident, and critical work needed to advocate for the historically underrepresented. Collaborative projects with local artists, individuals and community organizations will be encouraged and supported to directly connect students with local communities. Students will be required to present self-driven work periodically in response to selected topics, readings, and community discussion.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course emphasizes the mining and contextualization of one's own work as a nexus for growth through the active, ongoing and evolving consideration of your own studio practice as a topic of study in itself. This work will spring from and shed light on your creative intuition, processes and outcomes in a way that will helps you to communicate your work to others through language. In turn, it is hoped this voicing of essential components of your work will help streamline your practice and expedite your artistic production.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

As a culmination of the MFA program, this intensive studio challenges students to design and craft a significant, topically-focused body of work. Although students may choose creative formats and media according to their own interests, they must publish thesis work produced in class. Publication through digital platforms (podcasts, websites, apps, etc.) will be coordinated with analog forms when possible and appropriate to the project. Together with the research and writing produced in ILLUS 606G Paradigms and Contexts: Publishing the Thesis and Beyond, a comprehensive body of work and a written thesis document will be produced.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $1,500.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This seminar supports the work of the Thesis Studio IV by providing a formal class setting in which to create written reflections on one's evolving studio thesis work as well as-more broadly-writings on illustration practice. Sessions will center on discussion of assigned readings as well as written responses to classmates' essays. These exercises will scaffold a more expansive documentation of their Studio Thesis Project, and to serve as a forum for discussion of critical writing about contemporary illustration practice that will support an essay to be contributed to the groups final publication.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course surveys the history of illustration from prehistory through approximately 2000 AD. The work shown is culled from a vast cache of artistic production for its power to convey ideas and ideals, report and editorialize events or serve as an enhancement to literature. We consider how evolving technologies in printing and communication have influenced artistic processes, shaped aesthetics and facilitated the distribution of illustration. Emphasis is placed on Illustration's role in reflecting and influencing culture, and its variable relationship to its sister arts. The required class includes lectures, critical writing and discussions, weekly readings, a research project involving museum or special collections objects, quizzes and a final exam. Textbook required. Textbooks will be on reserve at the RISD Library and available for purchase at a student discount. Study images are made available on Canvas.

Open to Sophomore Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Illustration

This course surveys the history of illustration from prehistory through approximately 2000 AD. The work shown is culled from a vast cache of artistic production for its power to convey ideas and ideals, report and editorialize events or serve as an enhancement to literature. We consider how evolving technologies in printing and communication have influenced artistic processes, shaped aesthetics and facilitated the distribution of illustration. Emphasis is placed on Illustration's role in reflecting and influencing culture, and its variable relationship to its sister arts. The required class includes lectures, critical writing and discussions, weekly readings, a research project involving museum or special collections objects, quizzes and a final exam. Textbook required. Textbooks will be on reserve at the RISD Library and available for purchase at a student discount. Study images are made available on Canvas.

Open to Sophomore Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Illustration

This course surveys the history of illustration from prehistory through approximately 2000 AD. The work shown is culled from a vast cache of artistic production for its power to convey ideas and ideals, report and editorialize events or serve as an enhancement to literature. We consider how evolving technologies in printing and communication have influenced artistic processes, shaped aesthetics and facilitated the distribution of illustration. Emphasis is placed on Illustration's role in reflecting and influencing culture, and its variable relationship to its sister arts. The required class includes lectures, critical writing and discussions, weekly readings, a research project involving museum or special collections objects, quizzes and a final exam. Textbook required. Textbooks will be on reserve at the RISD Library and available for purchase at a student discount. Study images are made available on Canvas.

Open to Sophomore Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Illustration

This course surveys the history of illustration from prehistory through approximately 2000 AD. The work shown is culled from a vast cache of artistic production for its power to convey ideas and ideals, report and editorialize events or serve as an enhancement to literature. We consider how evolving technologies in printing and communication have influenced artistic processes, shaped aesthetics and facilitated the distribution of illustration. Emphasis is placed on Illustration's role in reflecting and influencing culture, and its variable relationship to its sister arts. The required class includes lectures, critical writing and discussions, weekly readings, a research project involving museum or special collections objects, quizzes and a final exam. Textbook required. Textbooks will be on reserve at the RISD Library and available for purchase at a student discount. Study images are made available on Canvas.

Open to Sophomore Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | BFA Illustration