What is your favorite part of SVS and what can we do better?
-
I second what @marsha-kay-ottum-owen said about more writing classes (and an author-illustrator one would be fantastic!).
Also - this is in comparison to other online children's book courses, not traditional art school. But something others are doing really well and would be a H-U-G-E feature if you offered it was to give class participants direct submission opportunities where they skip the slush pile (to select art directors you've networked with and got on board with it, or editors and agents). You'd probably want to limit these opportunities to only those in the LIVE classes though, especially since there would be a time limit in order to submit to those industry professionals.
Speaking of networking with industry professionals - what about classes that are actually taught by an art director, an editor, and an agent?
-
As far as course content goes, I think SVS is one of the best offerings out there. From my point of view (I have been to formal art school and I have been on Schoolism and on Digital Tutors for years) there is one thing that is unique to SVS and one thing that SVS could do better.
- Unique plus is the forum. There is no other offering I know that has an equally thriving and self-supporting community. I would build on this as a unique selling point. I would not mind having the forum only open to members (or maybe there could be different levels of membership) and have a more effective platform (posting images is not always simple) and some level of moderation. I think it is exceptional that the faculty tunes in in the discussions - I know it cost time and I would most definitely be prepared to pay for it. Different sub-topics could be an option as well, though I wold not fragment it too much.
- One thing that SVS misses (especially compared to art school) is a bigger offering of critiqued sessions. I know the new illustration courses have that, but I would personally be more interested in critiques on single images or on the option of doing the assignments on existing courses and have them critiqued. This is something that Schoolims had a while ago (they stopped doing that, so there may be some real time bottlenecks with that) - it was possible to do a registered course out-of-schedule for a fraction of the full fee and submit the assignments for a minimal critique and grading. It was not a full critique, more like a three-line statement on what worked and what did not work.
This may be more my personal need - sometimes I would really love the eye and suggestions of an experienced illustrator on a critical piece.
-
I for one like that the forum is public. Since I decided to temporarily stop my membership (with plans to re-open it when I can actually use it [moving+toddler+pregnancy=life is crazy right now]) having access to it despite that is valuable to me--and I hope that my thoughts and comments are still valuable to other members, despite my current lack of membership. I think that the current forum setting which requires new members to make a few comments before creating new topics is good (if it isn't changed from what I remember from joining months ago)--requires you to read and see what others are saying before diving in with your own thread.
I for one agree with @smceccarelli 's suggestion of making personal critiques more available. Thats one thing that is easy to get in traditional school which is more difficult online, but cannot be matched in value. It is obviously more time consuming than a class which is simply created and then released, but people who know the value will be willing to pay.
One thing I feel would be helpful with critiques is maybe having a very short questionnaire be filled out by the student submitting. Just a few short questions--What is your goal with this piece? What parts of it are you struggling with? What aspect of illustration are you trying to get better at right now? Thats it, no need to get more.
The reason I suggest this is I had one otherwise awesome critique from Lee where these questions were not asked, and his suggestions were great but did not take the piece in the direction that I meant it to take, if that makes sense. If he had known what the goal and central idea of the piece was, the critique could have been much more helpful to me.
-
I would like more courses and discussion on editorial illustration.
And I'd also like more info on the business/marketing side of it all. And definitely what @evilrobot said: etsy, children's market, mailing lists, cards, printing, etc.
I love everything about SVS and, though I have a paid membership, I love that the forum is open to all. -
I tell everyone about SVS and we all love it. There's so much relevant, helpful information that really sticks with you. Keep doing what you're doing!
As far as suggestions go, several members from my crit group and I were talking about how we'd like more female perspectives. We appreciate your nice assortment of classes and instructors, and we learn from everything we hear, but it would be nice to have a better balance of female perspectives - perhaps especially when it comes to contests?
-
I think SVS is doing really great, I've taken a couple of other online courses, but as @Jazeps-Tenis said: the focus on storytelling with your art is what makes me choose SVS over others.
A 'route' outline as @Andyg suggested might prevent overwhelm to new subscribers. There is so much great content that it is sometimes hard to focus.
I see questions on more traditional art (yes please!!) and more business-side of things. But I would love to see a class that is somewhere right in between (or after): You are getting the work, now what to do?
To explain what I mean:
I am getting some traction with publishers but when working I would love to know more on how to get my traditional art all cleaned up in photoshop( I go way overboard with cleaning, never knowing when to stop) maybe some digital color-management, how to make sure you have enough space for text and still fill the page, file management, etc etc. That info is hard to find and would really improve workflow. Could imagine you would also add the earlier stages, how to professionally present thumbs/sketches etc.About the functions of the site: it would be great if there's a way to improve the image-loading (viewing) on the forumthreads as @evilrobot mentioned.
Thanks for all you do and keep up the great work!!
-
I agree on the need for more female perspectives. We have three awesome guys and dads as our fearless leaders ( ;-)) but something I haven't been able to find is a woman illustrator to learn from (most especially a work at home mom, but I'll take what I can get). I know, I know, illustration is illustration. But women have different sensibilities and have different societal expectations on them. I LOVED the webinar with Sarah Jane Wright. More of that please.
-
I would like to see a section on the website of Artist services and sites you consider worth endorsing or at least you know are legit. For instance I found this school only because of an interview Will Terry did with Chris Oatley so I felt OK about subscribing for a year because I new it was legit but a lot of other services like editing services seem to be a challenge to find good information on
-
I absolutely agree with @Sarah-LuAnn and @Timbdsf that I'd like to see more women instructors.
-
Just curious, but what does it matter who you're learning art from so long as they're providing good instruction? I've taken Jake's inking class because he taught great things about using brush pens. I'm now taking Yuko Shimizu's class on Skillshare because she teaches great things about inking with a brush. It doesn't matter whether they're a man or a woman as long as they're providing good instruction. Am I missing something here?
-
On the one hand, I agree with you. Art is art. Illustration is illustration. Its true, up to the point that it isn't anymore. Am I being vague enough? Let me ramble a bit longer
Feminism is a weird thing because on the one hand I feel like one of its messages is "Men and women are the same and we're all just human and it doesn't matter!" But while that has some truth, the reality is that there ARE differences between men and women. Some of that is biological and mental differences, and a lot of that is still part of the societal and cultural expectations that people have.
In art, to me there is a difference in the sensibilities on Male vs. Female artists. Some ride the line in between pretty well, but the difference is there. Often times you can look at an illustration and come to an assumption of whether the artist was male or female--sometimes you're wrong of course, but often times you will be right.
Business is the same (and we're all trying to get into the illustration BUSINESS here, in some shape or form, I assume)--women can be awesome entrepreneurs, but often have different strengths and approaches to it than men. Which is a good thing! I'm not saying that they aren't equal. They're just different.
Another big one is the expectation society still has on women as far as career and family goes. It is all well and good hearing from three men how that has worked out for them. The advice is good and useful and I plan to apply it in my career. I'm not saying it is bad, or even flawed. But that doesn't change the fact that I am a stay at home mom trying to figure out this whole illustration career thing, and hearing from someone who comes from the same situation would feel so much more applicable. Its also simply validating as far as the concept of, "Look, here is someone LIKE ME who is doing what I want to do. Maybe it really is possible."
Many women might not care. But clearly a few of us do. So, that is something worth mentioning in a thread such as this one.
So, am I sexist? I don't know. I am NOT saying that I have felt discriminated against here, either by students or faculty. And I think the classes and community here at SVS is useful to me either way, so I'm not saying that this is a HUGE MAJOR FLAW, or that the instructors are sexist. But when asked what might make my experience here better, I do have to mention that it would be great to feel more represented gender-wise among the faculty/owners.
-
@sarah-luann Hey Sarah - i'm agreeing with your post and just throwing my 2 cents in -(I'm pretty sure that i recall Will mentioning in a third Thursday live event that they do try hard to get female instructors but have found it very difficult - so we know the issue is on their radar) I know from my own experience as a teacher that having or not having someone like yourself as an instructor does make a difference to students - there is much more to being successful than becoming good at something - it is important or at least very helpful to know that our aspirational goals are achievable - having diversity in our teaching staffs can show the student on day one that their aspirational goals can be achieved.....this is really important - "Can i really do this?" is a question answered for many of us without asking because we are surrounded by successful examples of folks that are similar in appearance and human experience who Are successful - this is just one aspect of why diversity is good but i just wanted to stress it because it can seem subtle if it does not effect us personally - anyways like i said - just my two cents
(How about Rebecca Green?...worth a try -
How do you decide which group categories are meaningful enough to have distinct representation though? For instance, I have Crohn's disease and that dramatically affects how I live my life and the opportunities I have available to me. It also can be a serious drain on energy. This isn't at all a pity ploy. I'm very at peace with the realities of my life and comfortable with the challenges this brings. I don't have any expectation though that I'm going to be represented in my unique circumstances, nor would I want it. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but rather speaking purely for myself.
Might it be interesting to hear from other artists who deal with long term illnesses in a podcast or something? Sure, I'd check that out, but I'd feel really weird about it if it just felt like a bit of tokenism. In fact the line between tokenism and representation seems very thin most of the time.
In the broader picture, it seems that you get to a really unsustainable place with this where you just go round and round with everyone vying for representation for their subgroup until everything is just artificial quotas. I know you're not saying anything as broad as all of this or as serious as all of this. I'm just extrapolating the long term effect. You can't possibly represent everyone there is to be represented for everything they want to be represented for. Look at my name. I'm half-Latvian and that means a lot to me. In fact more than most other things about me, but I've never once seen another Latvian artist teaching online or anywhere else. They may exist, but I've not seen it and even if I were to find them, I'd only be interested if they were a good teacher and teaching the things I wanted to learn.
And I'm not saying don't care about these things. It's not my place to tell anyone what to care about and I have no problem with you voicing what you'd like to see. I'm just saying that just as you pointed out how society has certain expectations and presumptions, so too does society at large show preference towards particular elements of identity over others. Possibly even to an inflated degree. There's any number of factors which give a person a unique perspective after all. Their sex, yes, but also where they live, their background, family history, upbringing, their health and on and on.
The short of it is I guess is that we can always find various ways to relate to different kinds of people so long as we're really considering the whole person and not just particular pockets of identity. You might very well find a busy father more relatable than a particular kind of mother. A black person and a white person might connect over common feelings of alienation despite having different experiences which caused it.
That's enough of my own rambling though.
-
@jazeps-tenis I don't know if this is a good enough answer or not, but maybe you can decide that a group is distinct enough to warrant representation when they make up a good portion of your customer base. I have no idea what the stats are on SVS customers, but if I had to guess, I'd assume women make up at least close to half. I could be totally wrong though.
-
Tess said it. I could say more on the topic, but in the interest of keeping this thread focused on the original topic I would suggest that if we feel the need to discuss the topic further it be continued in another thread.
-
I think there's a lot of problematic implications of this, but I doubt it will lead to any productive conversation so I'll let it be.
-
What is so fascinating about the SVS forum is that, while talking about art, the community touches on so many different aspects of society and life that are expression of being a human being living on this planet (at least in the North-Western emisphere) at this particular time of history.
I am not contributing to this discussion but just raising another aspect of it which is maybe more pragmatic. There are a few non-US artists in the forum and on the courses - I am not sure how many of them, but maybe the administrators know. Now, while different perspectives based on gender, ethnicity or health may have an impact on how we approach creativity, time-management, self promotion or motivation, geographical areas are most definitely different in terms of market. It would be great to have some contribution from an European artist or art director specifically about the differences between the European and the American market. I have collected a few along the last year:- European artists are often unrepresented on the European market and some clients do not like to deal with agents (not sure about this, but defnitely the majority of my European colleagues who are active professionally are not represented);
- Advances for children books in mainland Europe are a fraction of the US typical advances. Not sure about UK;
- The whole foreign rights management is vital to the artist/author income, as no single country has a big enough market (though probably there are exceptions);
- There are some different preferences in terms of art style - these are sometimes very local to specific countries, but it would be nice to have at least some discussions of the specific differences between UK and US (and Canada as well, when we are at it);
- Children books are of different length. Longer children books are very common in Germany, while UK ones seem to be shorter (and I believe this is due to the habit/necessity of printing hardcover and softcover at the same time, while in the US this is done at different time points);
These are certainly only a few and may be anedoctical or not completely correct. In general, how can an artist enter the European market effectively and whether it is worthwhile to do so would be what I would really like to know. The world is much smaller today than it ever was - yesterday I was contacted by a publisher in Turkey, and honestly I have no clue how things are approached there either....
-
I've been curious about the European market as well! I think my art has a pretty American look to it, but often when a book is released with a different cover for the US and European markets, I usually find that I like the European cover more.
-
Another thing that I myself have trouble with is adjusting scans or photos of original artwork in Photoshop to look like the originals. I'd love to see the process pros use to get their images ready for publishing.
-
I really enjoy the forum but I find the delay loading of the pictures a bit annoying...... or is it just me?
I like that SVS really focuses on the storytelling side of things, not so much in the software, although they cover it too.
In general. I love it
