So with no further delay I would like to start sharing with you my experience through the schoolism classes: Painting with light & color with Robert Kondo & Dice Tsutsumi.
For the next 9 weeks I´ll show you my weekly assigments and I´ll do my best to bring interesting information as well as sharing my own experiences. I swear I´m not beeing paid for this hahahahaha… I just had a great time and I think this might be helpful for someone who is thinking about taking this classes, or those who are already taking them, anybody, I don´t know… seriously, seek for your own studies, go on an take some lessons! Painting better is not going to do you no wrong!
The first time I heard of schoolism was 2015 and they were running a kickstarter. I was working in an animation studio at Barcelona and didn´t really had a lot of free time but I didn´t think twice when I saw that Robert & Dice were gonna be teaching an online course. So I just backed it up. It was already running over half a million CA$ so it was gonna be a reality no matter what. I think I paid around 150 CA$ for a year subscription and I that allowed me to do as many courses as I wanted for the price of 1 CA$ (yey!), but the sad truth is that I spent like 9 months in doing my 9 week course and I started after 2 months so I ended doing only this one (buuuuh).
Ok, so now I´m at week 1 and I can start. The first thing I notice is that these two guys are taking this seriously: they speak clear and they´re organized, they make demos and they´re not keeping secrets; they give you some wonderful brushes (a Tonko House set) and your assignments well prepeared in layers in a psd file with instructions on how to do the work and deliver it properly. Also they invite you to join their fb page for this course where you find a wonderful community of students like you. Not only that but also Robert & Dice, participate pretty often commenting the assignments and making possitive critics. I tell you, it´s an amazing thing checking on fb and finding you have comments on your work from any of these two artists.
It´s time to work. I didn´t have a laptop at the time so I had to paint from photo reference instead of doing it from life. I took the pictures myself but anyway I found later that there´s a big difference between the two ways of working and I ended up regretting not starting working from life since the beginning.
These paintings below started being 6 hours each, more or less. I put my attention into timming too and work hard on that to the point in wich I made them into a 3 to 4 hours of work each… but not on that 1st week.
Although I can see my mistakes clearly now, at the time I felt truly wondered with the ressaults since I had to work in a realistic way wich was not my usual way at all. I remember I was feeling highly motivated and happy at the time.
This were made around feb-march 2016.
I felt specially proud of this one (over) and I still do.
Some of the elemments are missing in this one (like the grille).
Here you can see the laso tool on the edges of the cup on the left. Laso tool is extremely important in this course and you´re gonna understand why the moment you start using it.
When I got to this one I was exhausted.