Thank you for your hard work, second-year students!
Following the first-year students the other day, today was the final class for the second-year students.
The "Digital" course started this academic year, and the current second-year students were the very first to take it.
Since using the school-designated software, ibisPaint, and using iPads were both new experiences, I studied ahead of time to prepare for teaching the class.
Fortunately, many of the functions are common to CLIP STUDIO, which I use regularly, so I didn't have much trouble.
However, since this is a class for learning "digital illustration" using ibis rather than a "class to learn ibis," I made sure not to rely too heavily on ibis-specific features so that they could draw illustrations without issues regardless of the software used. (I did introduce them to a certain extent, as there are features as convenient as photo editing apps.)
The students also seemed more familiar with digital than analog, and I had the impression that they were drawing very smoothly😊
I suppose young people today are more accustomed to digital than analog.
Since everything is completed on a single device, there's no need to gather tools, it's easy to redo work, and even if you can't draw, you can use 3D materials to trace and draw difficult poses... It has become a convenient world.
Thankfully, ibis is basically free to use as well.
In the past, digital color illustrations had parts that couldn't compete with analog, but now digital color illustrations have increased expressive power and allow for attractive expressions.
Analog has its own unique merits, and digital has strengths and benefits that cannot be easily expressed in analog.
Software is constantly evolving, and the skills of the artists who master it are also improving rapidly.
AI-generated images are popular now, but there are still many issues.
Since each has its own charm, I think it's a good thing that the methods of illustration expression are expanding😄
Well, the class was a process of trial and error, but I think I was able to structure the content well in my own way.
(I was a professional in analog, but digital was just a hobby, so I wasn't confident💦 That's why I had to mobilize all my knowledge and was constantly studying💦)
The first-year class was for creating monochrome works only, so since it's easy to apply color in digital, I proceeded with coloring as the foundation.
Therefore, the first half was structured around lessons on color.
From there, we studied various ways of applying color.
We did things like looking at reference materials to bring out the texture of objects using only color, and at the end, I had them draw manga digitally... and so on.
The basics such as sketching, perspective, and composition were covered in the first year, so perhaps the content for the second year tended to be a bit more specialized.
It might have been good to incorporate a bit more about "what current popular illustrations are like" in a more holistic sense rather than just focusing on parts🤔
Also, when students showed me their work outside of class hours, I gave them some advice😊
Seeing the lively illustrations of students who brought them to me saying, "Please look at this!" makes me happy too, thinking, "They really love drawing pictures💕"😄
Since a different teacher is in charge of the third-year students, this academic year is truly the last time I will be with the current second-year students, and it makes me feel lonely🥲
I hope they continue to love drawing and keep at it, even if it's just as a hobby, in the future🍀✨