Master Environment Design with Grady Frederick

• Day 1 Thumbnails:Start a process of very loose and exploratory thumbnail generation exploring the themes and core elements you’d like to include in your design. The idea is to exhaust as many ideas as possible to rule out the most generic, and find the most compelling and exciting directions. You’ll work mostly from imagination and try to tap into what you really want to create, with minimal influence from references. The quality of your drawings does not matter here, you are just finding the idea, and this will remove a great deal of pressure from the later stages of the design process.
  
• Day 2 Value Compositions: With plenty of jumping-off points from day one, you’ll now choose 3-4 options to pursue. Starting with a demonstration of the Notan sketch, you’ll begin building strong graphic compositions indicating overall lighting and value structure in grayscale, and starting to refine the selling points of your environment designs. You’ll also begin the process of reference gathering, keeping them limited and specific to avoid clouding your vision.
• Day 3 Colors: Choosing a final direction, you’ll learn how to efficiently add color to your value sketch using gradient maps. You’ll establish simple and effective color palettes using the 60-30-10 rule, and learn how to harmonize colors to create an elegant and believable atmosphere in your design.
• Day 4 Refinement: This session will focus on resolving the major details and focal points in your image, using clear and intentional design and form language. You’ll learn where to focus your rendering efforts, and when to leave things be. You’ll also learn an easy method for color and value adjustments on the fly, to ensure you are sticking to the strong value structure you established earlier in the week. You will finish the day by making notes over your image, indicating what needs final touches, refining, or adjustments in order of priority. This will help you have an objective overview of your image on Friday morning, and a concise plan of how to finish it.
• Day 5 Finalizing/Callouts: You’ll begin by addressing the notes you made at the conclusion of the previous session, according to their priority. This method will ensure that, even if you run out of time, you will have at least resolved the most crucial components of your design. Addressing all of these notes is a nice objective way to decide when an image is finished. You’ll then use any remaining time to choose a couple elements from your environment to show as isolated callouts. This is a good habit to develop, as these clear design callouts are tremendously valuable in production settings. You’ll then spend the final hours creating a clean and professional presentation of your designs, fit for your portfolio.

We provide high-end computers with dual monitors, Wacom Intuos tablets (including styluses), and all necessary software licenses to ensure participants have everything they need for the workshop.

Courses run from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with a one-hour lunch break. We welcome students starting at 9:30 a.m. with fresh coffee. Our school is located at 13 Rue de Rosenwald, 75015 Paris.