Art School admission 2017

College Majors Visual Arts and Film Majors
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Thank you everyone. Just can’t wait to find out where she will be in 6 months,

We were looking yesterday, and it looks like a lot of the people who got into Cal Arts applied more than once. It’s a great program, but not sure about putting your life on hold for a year or two to keep reapplying. My daughter loved it, and was very sad when she got the notice but she has moved on. We will wait to hear from RISD and Pratt, and then she will have to do some soul searching in terms of what she is looking for as as $$$s will weigh in from our part also.

What type of degree is everyone’s child in? Mine is computer animation.

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@CAShirl mine is really wanting to do 2-d character animation, she loves digital art as well. We were not sure about the distance to CA or the money for CalArts! But still would have been nice to have had the choice… but not meant to be!

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Just got VCU financial aid packet. $0. Bye bye!

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@CAShirl I took my son to see CalArts last week. We love it there. However, the average age of freshmen in animatin is 21 years old. The portfolio is expected to have nude figure drawing but my son is still underage (he is a junior in high school).

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@Jazzbutcher Congrats! My son is going to Ringling for the preCollege program. Do you mind sharing his GPA/SAT/accepted portfolio? Thanks.

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@AskExperts My daughter was required to do a figure life drawing class over the summer for her AP Art class so had nudes. Check out summer art programs at colleges. We are in the Bay Area and one of the SF colleges does a free summer program for high school students as a recruiting tool.

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@CAShirl Thanks for the info !

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@AskExperts Re figure drawing classes…I don’t mean this as a parenting issue, but if your son’s going to art school he’s going to have to draw nudes and the more competitive schools want/expect to see that in high school portfolios.

If you’re both comfortable with that, look into figure drawing sessions provided by local colleges or arts centers and even art stores. Figure drawing classes are offered at all three in my small city and the college ones are even free (the others are about $15 and they pool the money to pay the model). Both of my kids attended as high schoolers. I was expected to sign them in and give parental approval, but as long as they were there to draw they was no problem or issue with having them attend. And they could choose what angle/where to sit so they could sort of manage their own comfort level.

First time my son went? He had an amazing sketch of the young woman’s…feet. :wink:

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@AskExperts my daughter is also a junior and she’s been drawing nudes since freshman year. This is very common in the advance drawing classes. My brother can’t get over it and joked why couldn’t she draw fruits :))

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I have a student who just withdrew from SAIC. We’re pretty pissed - but don’t want to skew things too badly. So let me do what I can to offer objective view…

They have a first year program that’s hated by a great many students. I’d suggest you grill them about the first year. It’s not documented on their website. My son’s experience was that it was very tough for a digital arts guy - and that the people with heavy drawing, painting, and/or sculpture did best. Kids also did well by doing performance art in class.

HIs frustration is that quality making was dismissed quickly - and the instructors cared mostly for what he considered shallower work that had a “big point” to make.

You might also ask them about drop out rates. Their retention rates on the website look good - but anyone they can claim “transferred” to another program are not counted. Now he’s down on the program - so he will see more than is there sometimes. But in his first semester photography course of about 12 students, he was the 5th to withdraw by 3 weeks into the second semester. Don’t know what a realistic number overall is.

Anyway, these same cautions are probably true for ALL art schools - really grill them about what the actual program is - not just what the website says. My wife and I are both professionals in art (commercial for me, fine for my wife) but neither of us got there through art school. So we were very surprised by what my son ran into at SAIC.

We recommended he withdraw because we didn’t see the first year program being foundation that would help him sort out a professional life in the art world - unless museum curator, art professor, or grant funded performance artist were his goals. None of those are his goals - he loves far more vibrant art - the art of movies - art of big performances - and artists like deKooning and Jasper Johns - decidedly NOT Andy Warhol. Those were the opposite of SAIC’s first year.

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@ArtAngst Thanks for the great advise. I am having difficulty of finding the class for my son. Most studio I have spoken to offer just the model, my son might need some instructions.

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@NYCMomof3 Thanks for the information!

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@atlascentaur sorry about your son’s experience. My neighbor’s daughter is a junior at SAIC and loves it. Everyone’s experience is different. Good luck to your son where ever he chooses to go.

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When she was in high school, my daughter did a really great sketch of a nude bald guy during her portfolio class at the local art college. He was semi-perched on a stool, leaning back slightly, arms crossed - on full display and looking very cross. From the sketch, it was pretty obvious she was directly in front. She never did include it in her art school portfolio - I think she was embarrassed. Maybe she was trying to respect privacy LOL. I loved it and was disappointed that it never got included.

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A lot of students coming into art school are not prepared for the contemporary/ conceptual approach to art that is taught in many, many (if not most) schools. D did NYU’s summer art intensive as a rising senior and it helped her understand what NYU was about. She had also taken weekend art classes at Pratt junior year.

Prior to those experiences, art to her was representational and traditional. Her high school, considered to have a good art program, was all 2-D–mostly working in color pencils, ink, and acrylic paint. She had built up a portfolio that showed skill and technique, but not imagination or theme. In school she was often given a display to copy or a photograph.

NYU’s summer program opened her eyes to seeing art as both conceptual and contemporary. And she was hooked. It sealed the deal that she would study studio art. She loved that NYU had a lot of academic and art history classes that made her think about art and the stories art can tell.

It was exactly what she wanted.

A close friend who went to our same high school and was exceptionally talented at representational art HATED Carnegie Mellon because is was conceptual. She didn’t want to think about her art in that way and it was not at all a fit. She ended up dropping out of CMU after the first term and then re-applying the following year for their graphics design program. That suited her much better and she will be graduating a year later than D.

@atlascentaur I was surprised that you and your wife were so unprepared for what art school was about since you seem to be working artists. But now that you’ve revealed that you did not attend art schools yourselves, it makes more sense.

NYU’s foundation year did offer technique and the opportunity to do representational/ traditional art. But from the beginning, a big part of critiques (something you obviously were not exposed to) is being able to talk about your art and the choices you make as an artist and their meaning. It seems that this is a challenge for many and that the first year is just the beginning of the journey of discovery what kind of artist you want to be. There is a place for all types of art in the contemporary/ conceptual world–it is much more the idea that art has meaning that is stressed, not the actual technique, colors or materials used.

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Hi everyone!

I’m an international student and I applied for BFA graphic design, and I’ve been reading all the responses for a while and they’ve all been really helpful! So thank you :slight_smile: I’m actually in the middle of making a decision as well as waiting for some decisions.

So to run through it quickly, I’ve been fortunate to have been accepted to SVA, MassArt (with scholarship yay) CalArts, SAIC, and Parsons (w/ scholarship), and I’m waiting on Pratt and Emily Carr.

I was able to visit Pratt and Parsons a couple of weeks ago, and I found that I really liked Pratt, so i reckon that that’s probably my first choice. I didn’t really enjoy the vibe of Parsons so I don’t think I’ll be going there :confused:

That being said, my family and I have been preparing for the possibility of a rejection from Pratt, so a quick trip will be made to my second and third choice schools so we’ll be able to see if it’s a right fit for me.

That being said, I have absolutely NO idea what my second and third choices are, and obviously i can’t visit ALL the schools, so i have to pick 2 (maybe 3 depending on location) so i was hoping to gain some insight and advice on which uni you think should definitely be visited.

I definitely would like to be in a city, which is why I’m a little hesitant about CalArts because i’ve heard that it’s practically in a desert (could be wrong about this). Also, just for a little more information, I am fortunate enough wherein money is not that big of an issue, so there is that.

So I’d really really appreciate any information or advice anyone would be able to give me about the course, the school, the people, the party scene, literally anything haha. Being from outside the States, I haven’t really got a lot of resources to look into :confused: But thank you so much in advance to any responses! :slight_smile:

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If you got into all those other schools, you should get into Pratt, unless you applied for architecture (more selective). Hopefully with scholarship! :slight_smile:

My daughter was similar to you - didn’t like Parson’s so much (although the graphic design program is excellent). She’s at Pratt now in communication design with the graphic design concentration and really loves it.

Keep us informed!

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@JBStillFlying nope, applied for communication design as well! Practically on the same boat as your daughter was haha.

And thank you for your support! But I don’t want to get my hopes too high, and I’m trying to prepare for the worst. :confused: Hopefully I hear back from them in the next week (or few days!), I’ve been so anxious and have been checking social media, my email, everything, every single day! Just want to rip the bandaid off already haha.

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@AskExperts generally figure drawing sessions do NOT include instruction. However is your son taking art classes in high school? My kids’ teachers did include figure work in the curriculum - ie they were drawing other clothed students or working from reference photos or sculptures.

However, it’s really all about them just drawing, drawing and drawing. Learning to look at the structure and musculature of the human body. So going to open figure drawing sessions (ie no instruction) is still very worthwhile. All of my kids early attempts never made it into their portfolios, but they learned alot by looking at their work and starting to see what was wrong and move on from there.

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@JBFlying Liked your story - she should have included it! I review portfolios for our college as part of a NPD we host and there’s one local model we have seen every inch of him by now. My daughter’s got him in her portfolio too. And there’s even non-local models we can ID depending on what part of the country the student is from. Trust me, no angle or body would surprise us at this point. :wink: