Selected Classwork

Art 250 was a new prerequsite which I discovered when I took a look at the class catalogue of Los Angeles City College after the absence of several years. In the interim, quite a lot of the old guard had retired, and there was a whole new crop of instructors.

There was also a growing acceptance in the Department that Art, these days, is as likely to be digital as it is to be analogue. So, whereas a decade earlier, Art 501 had been the prerequsite for everything, both digital and analog, there was now a 2nd prerequsite for specifically digital classes.

Since it is a great deal simpler to just go ahead and set aside a semester and take the prerequsite than it is to try to convince an instructor — who wouldn’t know me from Adam — why the requirements ought not to apply to me, I went ahead and signed up.

On the whole, it was just as well I did. I really needed the refresher in Illustrator — which had never been my vector program of choice, so I was decidedly rusty. And even Photoshop, which I was certainly familiar enough with, had aquired some new capabilities which I had been unaware of, since they were not a part of the versions of the program which I had originally learned.

Being an introductory class, most of our assignments were fairly basic procedures, including a lot of lab exercises to get a feel for the tools, and as such, not likely to generate much that seemed worth posting. But our last lab exercise and our final project were Photoshop animations, which I thought were rather fun.

The lab exercise was a simple animated GIF. I animated a name panel which had been done for an earlier assignment during the course.