Illustration Masters Class. It Begins.

Yesterday, as part of the forthcoming Illustration Masters Class of '12,  I got an email from Rebecca Guay: The Assignments! Selected by IMC core faculty art director, Irene Gallo.

IMC is one week long, crammed full of critiques, demos, and lectures by a heavy-hitting star-studded line up of Core and Guest faculty.

One month in advance, we the students, are given a list of story prompts to chose from. (Day one of IMC  is June 9th.)

Generally, the assignment is to create cover art or an internal piece for the story we have selected. We can tailor it to adult, YA, kids books, middle grade, comics, etc, wherever our interests lay. (If desired we can also do a personal portfolio piece on another subject: they are flexible that way.)  But the bottom line is that by the time we all stumble in on day one, we must be ready to put our initial B&W concept sketch up on the wall and have it be heavily critiqued by the faculty.  The rest of the week (with all it's demos, lectures, etc...) is geared to take those initial (now heavily critiqued) studies and turn them into a polished final product. 

The assignments to choose from this year:

Tristan & Isolde. The ancient tale of two lovers, complete with dragons and magic and love potions, etc...

Tarzan! Who turns 100 this year. With particular eye to tailoring the subject to today's sensibilities (ie, no Damsel in Distress Jane and lay off the body-builder Tarzan stereotype)

Hunger Games. Well of course :)  The movie can be used as a guide for imagery... but please don't just copy the sets and costumes therein.

Our Human: a science fiction story with an anthropological 'primitive' feel.

Cairn in the Woods: a YA ghost story, in a contemporary rural New England setting.

and last but not least...

The Old Man's War. by John Scalzi. (Woohoo!) Hard SF. Self-Healing battle armor. Bug-like aliens. Etc.

So. Yes. Time to get serious. Along with deciding which of these stories (or another one?) to work with, I am also debating whether to do cover art, or to panel out the story into a comic book. (Very very tempted...)

Anyhooooo, will keep you posted. Hoping to document the process from start to finish.

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(This IMC, I will be working almost exclusively in digital media. It's just what works best given my situation right now.)