other programs at risd

Sand Dune house by Katharina

risd has a lot of programs here that we don't have at ECI. The ones I can think of are:

architecture
glass blowing (glass)
jewelry and metalsmithing
apparel design
textiles
interior architecture
illustration

I went with a couple of exchange students who are in architecture, Annabel from New Zealand and Katharina from Germany, and went to check out their studios:


It was one huge room, as far as the eye could see, full of drafting tables.

I also went to check out textiles one day, they had rows of looms, and rooms full of colourful threads/yarns that looked like it would be very fun to create designs with. I saw this work in a classroom:


I wrangled myself an illustration studio, so now I have one on the top floor of the Illustration studies building, and one painting studio. It is interesting to see some of the paintings in the illustration department. They are helping me to understand painting as opposed to illustration. Illustration painting is a lot about straight up representation & rendering, whereas painting, well, I don't know what the hell it's about! (but that's another story!)Here is my illustration studio with someone's illustration painting seen in the foreground:


There was a talk by a former risd illustration student, David Weisner, last week. He won the most recent Caldecott Medal for children's picture book illustration for his book "Flotsam". He has won a total of 3 Caldecott medals. Our class and another class got to talk with him in a classroom, a pretty intimate setting. He talked a lot about how he struggles struggles struggles! to come up with story ideas, and even after he has received his advance payment from the publishing company, and it is done and spent, he said he still has no idea what to write about! Such pressure! It takes about one year to illustrate a book, once he has his story idea figured out. And he said that he is now in the position where he doesn't have deadlines, he takes as long as he needs to illustrate a book, because of his success. It was refreshing to hear that with all his success, he still struggles to come up with ideas. On the other hand, this was also daunting to hear: What, with all your success, it's still a grind of pressures?? Here is an image from his new book from his slideshow, He creates his images in many many many thin layers of watercolour on watercolour paper. it sounds like a very time consuming process: