Hi, this is my first post at cgtalk. I’ve been visiting the page for a long time, but only as a guest, and then mainly to look at peoples art and glancing through the tutorials. This forum has been very educational and inspiring to me.
Now down to business. I’m 17 years old and I’m going to a norwegian high-school on a line spesialising in Visual art. I started at this line a year and a half ago. At first my motivation for this was to learn to draw and paint, and to meet other people with a simmilar passion to the craft. Turned out things didn’t go totally my way. Many of the people on the line didn’t go there because they where interested in visual craft, but because going through the first year would allow them to go into a more work related education the second year. Such as hairdressing or flowerdecorater. Some went to the line because of some troubles with the teoretical line(caused by the management), and thus got into their second choise of school. Other people didnt want to go to school at all, but where forced there by their parents or other reason unknown to me to attend it. Some of these were quite unpleasant and managed to create a bad social atmosphere all on their own. I had expected this line to be quite nishe and hard to get into, but instead it turned out that it functioned as a habour for people not at all interested in school or only semi intrested in visual art.
I do think that I did learn a lot from this first year, my drawing skills did improve, and I did get a better understanding of how color work. Still I did have quite a few moments where I wondered what the point of the tasks where. We had about 8 or 12 hours of drawing each week, and I realy enjoyed these classes. We did studies and sketches and learned some elementary skills. Our drawingteacher were a real artist, who understood better than many of the other teacher what my expectations for the line had been. She certainly were quite motivating. We had maybe around 6 or 8 hours a week with color theory each week, and I did enjoy these classes as well. I did feel that some of the tasks and excercises we did could have been more revolved around learning to paint objects and scenes, but as I figuered that good understanding of color theory where vital for any kind of artist I endured it. The last of the classes which had its base in visual art where Shape-classes, these i did not enjoy as much as many of the other classes. They centered more around abstractions, building patterns and ornaments. In the base of these 3 elements there would allways be a process the teachers called stillisering. This involved takeing a picture and traceing it onto another useing the lighttable. When you had done this once, you would take a new piece of paper and copy the drawing from the first paper onto this. This time you were to remove the lines least important for the overal impression of the picture and the ramaining lines where to be simplified or exagarated. This would be repeated untill all you were left with where a totally abstract picture. An intresting exsercie I can agree to do once, or even twice, but doing it over and over again for almost every single project in the shapeclasses made me frustrated. I couldnt understand the point of it. It did feel rather useless.
Today I’m halfway through my second year, and things has improved. We have even more classes dedicated to drawing, we have started doing some paintings, and the new teacher hasnt had a single project requiring stillisering. All off the unpleasant people has changed schools or dropped out, and I’m generally pleased. Still I do miss something and that is talking to, shareing knowledge and advice about drawing and painting in general whit other people who has a passion for drawing. None of my classmates wants to be visual artists, and none of my present teachers are artists at all. I’ve never seen them drawing, painting or even doing a doodle. When they present tecniques in drawing they never demonstrates, and the critiques of a picture isn’t allways helpfull. And I miss response on the process I use to create and finish a picture.
And then I’m finally gotten to the point. I’m enquiring what kind of online communities there are for people who want to collaborate in learning this craft. An obvious answer would be this and many other forums, but at present I would find it hard to relate to all the tens of thousands users of this forum. I would prefere a much smaller community, maybe say 10 -20 people. Such as the community one finds when one join a friendly clan in the computer game scene. The people in a clan might be of different skill, age and nationality, but they are all shareing knowledge, tips and techniques and the experience of doing something they love. Now I know playing a computer game hardly can be compared to drawing and painting, but this is the only way for me to describe what I mean.
