More Info on Painting Color & Light Class

First: These Santa images will be part of our homework optional assignments in our "Painting Color & Light" class. We'll be offering finished drawings to use for practice paintings of various color and lighting situations in our LIVE class. Recorded class members will also receive the homework assignments but will not receive the critiques. In a few weeks we'll send out all of our homework options so students can pick and choose what they want to work on during the class.

Second: Because we have so much information to give out on our upcoming Painting Color & Light Class we have decided to offer a few short prep classes.  These classes will be FREE for those who can attend them LIVE online. We will offer the recordings in our store afterwards for a fee but if you can make it on January 7th at 7:00 MST you will be able to join us live for free - we'll send out links to join our GTM session so put your email in the comments below if you would like to receive the joining links. We will upgrade to a higher level of software to accommodate over 100 attendees if there is that much interest.

We'll go over many principles that you would learn in a color theory and rendering class to bring students up to speed for the "Painting Color & Light" class. It's very helpful to be able to hit the ground running when we start our 7 week class and we want everyone to feel like they understand what we're talking about in that class. (did I say 7 weeks? yes - we added another critique class for our LIVE students!) Below you will see the material we will cover in our prep classes:

Light and Shadow What is value and how is it used? What are gradients and how do they work in a drawing? Can drawings work in mostly light values, dark values, both? Lighting shapes What direction should my light be coming from? How does light fall on a sphere, cube, cylinder, & human form? What is the relationship between the darkest dark and lightest light? why is reflected light important to show form? What are cast shadows and what happens to their edges? What direction do shadows go? What are occlusion shadows
Painting Color What colors should I buy or use? Are white and black colors? Should you ever use black? What happens when you mix various colors? What are cold & warm colors? What is a vibrating color? What are color opposites? What’s the difference between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors? What are tints, shades, and gradients? What is a triad? How can you neutralize two colors? What’s is a complimentary color scheme and an analogous color scheme? How can I get rich color in my painting?

Our email list is continually growing and all our upcoming classes and announcements are sent out to our email list first. Put your name and email below to stay up to date on what we're doing at SVS!

"Gary's Place" LIVE for iPad - Steps 8 & 9

Build the app & submit to the app stores.

So much has happened in the last few weeks! We finished our app - submitted it to apple - got it approved and started marketing it!

In the following video I interview my son Aaron who used Kwik to develop our Gary's Place app. He also submitted it to the Apple app store and we talk about that as well. If you're into this stuff you might find our video useful as you move forward with your own story.




Check out reviews of Gary's Place:
Rob Smith
Jan Watford
Digital StoryTime
TheiMums
Bestappsforkids

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Painting Color & Light Online Class

I'm very excited to announce our SVS Painting Color & Light class that is now available on our website. I'm not sure what I like painting more - color or light - so why pick? Let's do them both! Actually you really can't have color without light and vice versa so it makes sense to have a class dedicated to the exploration of both.

The class will start at the end of January and will run for 6 weeks each Tuesday. You can see all the details here.

This class will also offer some very detailed assignments - I'll blog about them later as we get a few weeks out from the start of the class - but I have already designed them. Students will have a choice of 3 assignments at various levels. Also - there will be two prep class sessions in early January that we will offer for free for those who are new to painting, have never taken formal illustration classes, or need to brush up on their value and color skills. These prep classes will be offered for free if you can attend the LIVE video taping but will be offered as a video in our store if you cannot make the Live session. I'll announce those dates very soon. We'll use an upgraded version of GoToMeeting so we can accommodate a large number of attendees.

Adding luminosity to your paintings can make the difference between "good" and "AMAZING!"

Oh, and we'll also be featuring Blue Sky artist Ty Carter - he's been taking the animation industry by storm with his amazing luminous paintings! Check out his work here and check out the class here.

Flying Fish Character Design

This was one of my studies for our upcoming character design class this Saturday - it's been a blast preparing for it. I love taking time to develop personal exploratory work. For those of you already signed up I look forward to meeting with you during and after the class in our personal sessions! Thank you! http://schoolofvisualstorytelling.bigcartel.com/

How To Make A Story App - Step 7

Add sound effects to your story app.

This was one of the funnest parts of the creation process. I was amazed at how much sound can "sell" an animation or idea - it's pure magic. Looking at your little animations work is great but they are silent by themselves - adding the right sound brings them alive.

Tips: I used freesound.org for a bunch of the sounds I used. The sounds are free to use as long as you give credit to the artists in your project. I only used "public domain" sounds and "creative commons" licenced sounds. The agreements can be easily viewed and read on their site.



I also created some sounds using tinyvox on my iPad and then altered them in Audacity. I couldn't find a good digging sound for Gary but I knew what I wanted - so I scratched my pant leg  - I know - weird right? but it made a pretty good sound. Then I doubled it up in Audacity, changed the pitch, and cleaned up the front and back end and it was perfect!

Kwik allows you to use both mp3 and wav files which you can create in Audacity. My total learning time in Audacity was about one hour from fooling around with the program and watching youtube videos produced by 8 year olds. One of the most important things you can do with your sound files is to chop off the dead space at the front and end of the clips. You don't want the users of your app to hear hiss or crackle before the actual sound is about to play.

Stay tuned as I'll keep sharing my progress on "Gary's Place" which I plan to submit to Apple, Google, Amazon, etc. in a few weeks. I'll continue to blog about this process even sharing my sales stats when it hits the various app stores! If you're wondering where the first steps are I started this project back in September 2013 - check these links:

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