Laguna College of Art + Design doesn’t look like a school—more like a sculpture garden adorned with the works of students and tucked away in the rocky canyons of Laguna Beach.
A closer look shows there’s enough going on to drive local and international businesses to call on the school, anxious to tap into its talent pool.
Among the latest callers was Beaverton, Ore.-based Nike Inc., which now has Laguna College students working on a pilot program dubbed the Nike Sponsored Studio. The semester-long project, the brainchild of Nike Chief Executive Mark Parker, involves four schools chosen after a worldwide search.
Laguna College students have begun working on “digital representations” of how people experience the Olympics. They will have a chance to earn a paid summer internship at Nike.
The school is small but “creatively scrappy,” and that helped attract Nike, said Catharin Eure, professor and chair of the school’s graphic design department.
“Between … industry and education, there is always a give and take,” Eure said.
Graphic design is a big part of the exchange between art and commerce. It’s one of the five undergraduate degrees offered by Laguna College, which was founded in 1961 and has about 470 students, with annual tuition of around $23,000.
The school also offers bachelor’s degrees in drawing and painting, illustration, animation and game art. It has a master’s program in drawing and painting.
The graphic design department and the 5-year-old game-art major—where students learn to create the imagery for video games—draw most of the inquiries from industry.
There are about 90 students in graphic design, with a staff of 12 faculty, including three full-time members.
Action Sports
The program also has launched an undergraduate program specializing in action sports under its graphic design department.
“We are the first four-year college in the world to offer an action-sports degree,” Eure said. “Action sports is a billion-dollar industry, and that business is coming to us to pursue educational initiatives.”
Evidence can be found at companies such as Costa Mesa-based Hurley International LLC and Vans Inc. in Cypress.
Students at Laguna College have done class projects for Hurley and will start one with Vans in coming months. They create their own lines of action sports apparel and footwear, using computer-aided design to craft styles and patterns.
The work will go beyond the classroom.
“We have a Vans program that kicks off in the fall at the Vans campus,” Eure said. “The students get to hear from the art director what makes a good employee. They can’t just design. They have to take creativity and funnel it back” to what works for the professional industry.
Laguna College President Jonathan Burke calls it a symbiotic relationship between academia and business.
31-Year Veteran
Burke is a 31-year veteran of the school and was its dean of fine arts, as well as gallery director, before his recent appointment as president.
His education and career span the fine arts curriculum, with an emphasis in representational drawing and painting with still-life and landscape. His background of painting and drawing didn’t limit him to canvases and brushes, though.
“I understood what was going on in visual communication,” Burke said. “At most schools, there’s a divide between fine art and visual communication. At this college, fine art serves as a foundation before students go into digital routes. There’s a respect for tradition. The ability to continue perennial landscape, classical figures, portraits … we’re teaching that language and helping students make a choice about where they want to go after having a thorough classics training.”
Burke helped launch the school’s animation program in 1999 and played a key role in developing the game-art major, which started with the incoming class of freshmen in 2007.
“We already have 90 students in the full-time game art major,” he said.
Its growth has been helped along by strong ties with the local game-development businesses. The college has a roster of OC-based professionals as part-time faculty: concept artist Gino Whitehall from Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment, Bob Donatucci from Double Helix Games in Irvine and Kurt Papstein from Newport Beach-based InXile Entertainment, among others.
“Our curriculum reflects what’s happening in the industry,” said Jack Lew, dean of visual communication. “We create the art that goes into the game. I came out of the video game industry. I was with Disney and made a full loop back to academia.”
Lew worked at Disney Feature Animation in Orlando, Fla., as senior manager of artist and professional development. He went on to Redwood City-based Electronic Arts Inc., where he helped develop relationships with art schools.
Warrior Princess
Classroom work for game-art students at Laguna College includes observing a warrior princess model complete with battle-axe and hand gun. Battle-toned music plays as students sketch the model walk around the stage or assume a fighting stance.
“The space the characters move … the texture, the color, the characters, the assets, the actual movement itself would be created by us,” Burke said. “You’ve got to think about the settings—is it the 1960s? Futuristic? There’s a lot of research involved, too, to combine all the epics.”
Students in an animation-rigging class work on setting up a foot-roll system for three-dimensional character development. They learn how a character pivots from the heel, toe or ball of the foot.
Top students work their way up to working on full, playable games through the school’s partnership with graduate students from University of Southern California’s game development program, GamePipe Labora-tory.
It’s a joint effort between USC School of Cinematic Arts and the computer science department at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. USC has been named the top school in the U.S. for video game design study by the Princeton Review.
“We don’t do the programming,” Lew said. “We do the art. Our students begin with fundamentals, move into team-based environment and come up with art for the game.”
Clockwork Zombies
Laguna College sophomore Matt Carranza was recruited to make models for the USC team on Clockwork Zombies, a game that chronicles the zombie-laden adventures of a watchmaker in a space colony.
“Team work counts for class credit,” Carranza said.
A group of students also have worked with the USC team on a game called Forestwalker, a two-dimensional fantasy game for the iPad.
Lara Colson, a Laguna College sophomore, is one of the artists on the team, who created the enemies for the game.
“Students in the last four years have gone to … Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Microsoft Games,” Lew said.
Game art department Chair Sandy Apple-off counts four students who have gone on to Blizzard, the second-largest software company based in OC.
Other local companies that have tapped Laguna College students and graduates include Obsidian Entertainment Inc. in Irvine and Aliso Viejo-based Carbine Studios Inc.
Burke calls the school lucky to be in Orange County.
“There are so many game companies that have settled here, and it makes it dynamic and exciting to be close to where games are being produced,” he said. “These companies look to us to be able to train the next generation of video game artists.”
