In July, I had an amazing opportunity to attend a week at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)! Through a program called SCAD summer seminars, which is a summer program for high school freshman, sophomores, and juniors. In this program, you get to spend a whole week as a SCAD student, which is so awesomely amazing I have a hard time forming cohesive thoughts about it.

We applied for the program as soon as we heard about it, and I won a partial scholarship to go, which is good because apparently everything nice is DANG EXPENSIVE now. I hate that, but I’m SO PROUD of myself for winning the scholarship.

SCAD is my top college right now, up in my top choices with RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) Parsons School of Design in NYC, and SAIC (School of the Art Institute of Chicago).

My mom took me to Savannah, where she would stay with a friend of ours in St. Simon’s Island for the week. We arrived in Savannah on Saturday and explored the city a little before drop off on Sunday morning.

Me, doodling at the Sentient Bean, my favorite coffee shop in Savannah.

Me and Mom, posing like the tourists we are in Forsyth Park!

Drawing at the best pizza place in the south, Mellow Mushroom.

After that week, I made a biocomic about my experience, day by day. Personally, I find comics WAY more interesting that just a load of words on a page, and so I’ll spare you my play-by-play and let my art speak for me!

In the summer seminar, you get to pick two “majors” for the week! I chose Graphic Design and Typography, and Figure Drawing. I loved them both, but my favorite was without question my graphic design class! My professor was really engaging, and our projects were interesting and challenging! As you might have seen, the first project was a mockup cereal brand of our own imagination!

This was my cereal box, a brand called “BLOOM” designed to bring families closer together over the breakfast table! The crumpled-looking paper on top folds up into a nice flower, turning the whole box into a centerpiece to be kept out on the table during the meal! The “surprise inside every box” is a seed packet that corresponds to the type of paper flower on top. The brand mascot didn’t make it onto the final box, because we only had a half an hour, but it was a sentient flower named Poppy, who was a scientist. Poppy’s job was to tell you fun facts about the flower you got!

I’m happy with this concept! I think it’s fun, innovative, and creative.

Our second project for the class was an accordion fold book illustrating the 7 Principles of Graphic Design through a popular snack brand. The Seven Principles are:

Balance
Proximity
Hierarchy
Alignment
Repetition
Contrast
And Negative Space.

(These vary from person to person, but these are the ones my professor showed us.)

We worked in partners in Photoshop, Illustrator, and a Photo Studio! Me and my partner were assigned the brand Kit Kat. We took all our own photos, and set to work.

I’m so proud of both of these projects! I really loved the Graphic Design class. It really shook up my perspective!

I made some pretty good sketches in Figure Drawing as well, but alas, I only remembered to take pictures ONCE. Here’s one of my favorite pieces from that class, a quick 15-minute figure.

Overall, I loved the experience. It was an amazing opportunity, and I’m so grateful to SCAD for the scholarship! If I had one complaint, it would be that we didn’t really get as much independence or exploring time as I would have liked. I’m told that SCAD’s summer program Rising Star is better for that, but we weren’t allowed to leave campus AT ALL. Makes sense for safety reasons, but I’m still upset about it. Other than that though, fantastic! I’m so glad I got to experience it.

I hope I can go to SCAD someday, but the crushing reality of the cost of education has begun to set in. SCAD does not give out full-ride scholarships, and the highest scholarship aid they offer still wouldn’t be enough for me to afford the college. In fact, RISD doesn’t offer full rides either.

On the bright side, both of these colleges offer full rides to GRADUATE students, so that might be an option! AND both Parsons and SAIC offer full rides to Undergrads! So that gives me hope!

It’s really hard to think about colleges. As a Junior, college looms larger and larger every day, as well as the fear that I won’t be able to afford ANY higher education. I’ve had to watch some of my dreams and visions for my future fall down, and it’s been really hard. Right now, a state school seems like the most realistic option. Don’t get me wrong, Indiana has some excellent colleges, but it’s a difficult step to go from the hope that I’ll end up at SCAD or RISD, to the expectation that I’ll wind up at a small college in Indiana. I don’t want to go to a state school. I love Indiana, but I want to see new things, experience college fully, and step into my new independence fully, instead of seeing familiar faces and landmarks around every street corner.

And so as of right now, my college future is up in the air. It’s scary as crap, especially for someone who has known exactly what they wanted virtually all their life. I don’t have a snappy, inspiring ending to this one yet.

However, I’m so grateful that I got to experience a week at SCAD, even if that turns out to be the entirety of my SCAD experience. (Let’s hope not!)

And so with that, I’d like to give a big thank you to SCAD for hosting a cool event like summer seminar. Big thanks to my parents, for paying for this opportunity, and to you, for reading! I’m sure you didn’t expect to be ambushed by real talk and crushed dreams when you opened this post, but you’ve made it this far!

Thanks for reading!

SCAD SUMMER SEMINAR!

New Octopus!

The Iguana