Sorry for the lack of updates lately but believe me, I was REALLY BUSY. As a side note, I cut down my Facebook use DRAMATICALLY, as in, I only open Facebook to check my mails twice a week and I am way more productive now.

Anyway so, after few weeks attending the Schoolism Gesture class, I grew more confident about my drawing skills and when a friend told me about the CGMWA Character design and Story classes, I knew I couldn’t pass on those rare opportunities, especially seeing who the mentors are.

AnimC has a great character design class with Chris Sasaki this term and an awesome Storyboard class with Louis Gonzales but moving back to San Francisco for three month is not doable at the moment, and summer coming, I am better off being on the French sunny sea side rather than cloudy/cold SF.

CGMWA is offering two great classes this term with the incredible Character Designer/Vis Dev guy, Nate Wragg and Dreamworks story artist, Steven Mac Leod.

I have been following Steven Mc Leod’s blog since he was at CalArts and always found it inspiring, the class is said to be for beginners but we are already creating some solid portfolios.

As for Nate, I discovered his blog by Googling the Ratatouille End Credits and immediately bought his first video lecture when it came out. I love the way he paints digitally as it looks like real brushes.

When he announced he was starting a Character design class, I loved his first video so much that I HAD to enroll. Now, I get to pick his brain and watch him work every week.

The CGMWA classes are only 8 weeks but they are pretty cheap compared to whatever is out there and certainly cheaper than CalArt that both mentors graduated from.

For the Story class, we had to submit few pages of sketches on the first week and this week was about creating one picture gags. I was busy moving house so I only did one which I used for both Character Design and Story. Clever hey!

This week’s Character Design assignment was to design a Templar. I am never really short of gag ideas, let’s see if that one makes sense!

Forgive the rough line work, I am very new to Photoshop for clean up and still have to find a good brush. I am getting there though. I will post something more worked out in few days.