Learning There’s A Fine Art To Pushing Pixels

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

Color On White opens at the Spirit Room Thursday night from 7 to 9 p.m. with hors d’oeuvres and a chance to meet the artists. These digitally rendered graphics are the work of Rasmussen College students in the School of Technology and Design. Their instructor, Alex Fogarty, teaches them here at the Fargo campus.

The untitled works in this show range from beginners to advanced. Typography, composition, color theory, and Photoshop painting skills are used to great effect.

Jason Radebaugh’s lions are a wonderful example of things that are possible with current software painting techniques. A close up shot of a lion and lioness, she on the left and he on the right, look off to something outside the right side of the canvas. The lion is compelling in his vibrant and realistic orange and brown hues, the lioness is a restrained and monochromatically gray foreground counterpoint. There is no evidence of Photoshop filters or other hints that would give away the software origin of this piece. Such is the case, with few exceptions, throughout the show.

Nick Wigtil’s painterly landscape looks like it could be part of a Group of Seven show (1920 - early ‘30s Canadian landscape painters). The handling of the ultra-realistic light is subtle yet spot on for his rendering of a wheat field and lake with mountains for a backdrop. Make sure to look at all of the pieces in the show closely, the student skill in making realistic, painterly art with software is remarkable.

James Ness’s work shows a middle aged man in a uniform jacket (reminiscent of Lenin’s Soviet military) with receding dark hair and dark full beard. The figure faces the viewer but stands at an angle, right hand inside the left breast of his jacket. The left sleeve is gone at the shoulder and shows a muscular and tattooed arm. This is the artists’s addition, making the work his own along with the highly graphic background treatment. The soldier looks utterly weary and beaten from whatever battles he’s gone through. His eyes are haunted by terrible events only he can remember and probably never be able to forget.

“This is going to come up – when you do this, or don’t do it that way – ... your boss is going to say ‘That’s not going to work.’ I try to simulate a lot of those types of scenarios (for my students).”

Students follow a process to create their art, starting with a search for reference photos that are chosen for color and spacial relationships. This aids students in creating their own original pieces of artwork.

Students start “sketching” and outlining parts of the photo they’re going to use with a tablet and stylus in Adobe’s Photoshop. Then underpainting (color building and blocking out of areas) is done with with digital brushes that simulate actual, physical brushes – fan, angled, round, etc. in the software program. These are the first steps in traditional oil painting.

Finally, customized brushes are used to build detail. This is done by first laying down pixels of color sharply and then adding more and more layers in the program that blur (soften) the painting to make it look realistic. Different lighting effects and opacities can also be made with the separate layers. This gives students a lot of control over the final outcome. Fogarty builds in time so that corrections can be made after the first critique, and a refined, finished piece is achieved.

The majority of Fogarty’s students are two year associate’s degree students. Students in her classes are a mixed bag of technological savvy – freshly out of high school, people in the workforce who are getting up to speed on the current tech, or those who are changing careers.

She makes custom online video tutorials to walk through each assignment so that the online students have as much benefit from her teaching and modelling of requested tasks as the residential students do.

Students are educated not only in the areas of aesthetic fundamentals and production skills but also with real-world knowledge, by Fogarty trying to impart her experiential wisdom. Her current students are hungry for the software skills and she really enjoys educating them about real-world types of production problems that they will probably encounter.

In 2010 she was living in Brooklyn with her partner and young son when she saw the Rasmussen job opening in Fargo and were looking to move out of New York after Fogarty had a career in Manhattan and was ready to take the next step, professionally.

“I want to use other parts of my brain and use the strengths that I had built to teach others – it seemed like a natural progression.”

When the Internet was just starting to take off, Fogarty started out doing web production (writing code) and also book production (laying out pages), making books to help people get onto the Internet.She transitioned to children’s television in 1998. Working on Blue’s Clues for six years, she made backgrounds for the cartoon and did some light animation. She later did the same kind of work on on Wonder Pets and Team Umizoomi for Nickelodeon’s Nick Jr. and Little Airplane Productions.

The animation style used in those shows is called photo-puppetry, and makes use of photographs of animals that are manipulated to “act” in software like Photoshop. One character she worked with, Slippery Slope, is a bar of soap that was shot from all 360 degrees. Then the action and corresponding photos were edited and facial expressions, mouths, etc. made to be synced with what was being said by voice actors.

“You don’t hand something in (to your boss) and they say ‘Go to print.’ What happens is that we create better work…because we factor that [the revision process] into it.” Revisions are the unglamourous part of a commercial designer’s job, but Fogarty says that every job is experience that helps generate the checklist of I-like-this or I-don’t-like-this which helps for making future career decisions.

The working knowledge she has gained over the years benefits her students, and that evidence is visible in her student’s work.

For more information about Rasmussen’s Faculty work, visit http://qr.net/Rasmussen

To check out Alex Fogarty’s work, go to AlexFogarty.com.

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IF YOU GO:
What: Color on White, The Art of Rasmussen Design Students.
When: The exhibit opening reception is Dec. 8 from 7 – 9 p.m., and will be on display until Jan. 13, 2012.
Where: The Spirit Room, 11 Broadway, Fargo, ND and at http://www.SpiritRoom.net.
Cost: Free. Hours: Noon to 4:00 pm Monday – Friday, 1:00 to 5:00 Saturday, closed Sunday. For more information, please call (701) 237-0230.