Thursday, January 29, 2009

Cool Things I Found On the Net This Week: Back to School Edition

Mark Mayerson, an animation professor at Sheridan College in Toronto, created a personal blog chronicling his opinions on animation. Even more interesting to me - he also created a Sheridan Animation blog with links to students' work. This is a great resource for anyone interested in attending Sheridan, as you can see the types of work that the students did for class, and their own personal projects.

Included in that blog is a link of the Sheridan Portfolio Review where you can see the admission portfolios of two students, Jonathan Coit and Jamie Metzer, who are now students at Sheridan.

There are also dozens of blogs of current and recently graduated students from the animation program. My favorite blogs are from fourth year students Jinny Liang, and Stacey Chomiak.
Jinny's work has been featured in ImagineFX magazine and Stacey worked for five years in graphic arts before becoming a student at Sheridan. Both of these ladies are clearly ahead of the curve with their work and are people to watch in the upcoming years.

Hats off to Mayerson and the students who posted their work for prospective students like myself to see. These links allow me to see what Sheridan wants from students and have enabled me to improve my own work.

2 comments:

Stacey Chomiak said...

Hi Angela,

Thanks for stopping by my blog, I appreciate any and all feedback!

Are you attending Sheridan this Fall, or a different animation school?

Good luck in your animation studies! You're in for a great ride :)

Stacey

Jonathan Coit said...

Thank you,

The blog is actually run by Andrew Murray, a good friend of mine who is a Sheridan Animation Student as well. I will pass on the word that you have found it helpful.

Mayerson is a great instructor and I am happy that you have stumbled across his blog. Check back regularly for his insights and thanks for name dropping me! Free advertising is wicked, especially as I am working to find an internship right now.

Keep up the good work on your portfolio, you are heading in the right track. My biggest pointers to you right now is to avoid shading on the drawings you submit (like the hand studies below) and do your best to include an "under structure" in all of your drawings, construction lines are a bonus.(life drawings, character designs, layouts, hand studies)

some examples:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/10/heckling-hare-step-by-step-construction.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/08/character-design-primer.html

http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/2007/09/cartoon-construction-101.html

I know these are all cartoony references, but I am sure you can get the point by browsing portfolio blogs on how to apply these methods to figure drawing and layout.