Government college of Fine Arts (formerly Madras school of Arts) - The first ever School of Industrial Arts established in India in 1850, which later became the Madras school of Arts and Crafts and then College of Fine arts as it is now known. It was started by the british more as a training center for crafts. (I still remember seeing photographs of my supeeeeer senior: sitting with pot making wheel with half shaved hair and raised hair locks with traditional panchakacham like outfits and working in class rooms - This photographs is in the college museum now)
Picture courtesy - The Artocrats, an online alumni community of GCAC
Picture courtesy - The Artocrats, an online alumni community of GCAC
The college took up arts and crafts more seriuosly as an education system when Debiprasad Roy Choudhury took over as the first Indian principal in 1929. Artists from the length and breath of India had travelled all the way to chennai to do their diploma in this college (It gives a nice feeling to know - I have walked the place they had years back). Even until today there are a lot of renouned people in the field of arts, animation, graphics, film industry who have made it big with their formal education from this college.
In the early days of my training I found the education system... as in, the teaching, trainning methods, syllabus to be slightly primitive, meaning in the year '94 when I did my 1year(its used to be a 5 year degree program), computer based designing was the hot thing (I'm taking about the photostyler days) In the contrary we at college were asked to do typography with pen and ink. I always used to wonder... when it is as easy as typing text and taking printout why do they ask me to sit and spend hours together figuring out how to do a slant line, curvy line with ink and brush.... There were a lot of design excercise like this. Today when i look back, I can relate it very well with what I'm doing at work, that is like even 8 years after finishing my course. I learned there are 2 parts of a design one is skill and other was technology. I guess at college i had mixed up then idea of knowing technology as the skill. But in days like this when there a lot of designers who are good at technology the skill which I learnt back at college is the differentiating factor.
It is an awesome place to be... And this article is a reminiscence of my college life and how it has equipped me to face the design world.
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Here's a design excercise which was easy for me to re-create. Take it up...
I enjoyed doing it as a student... I think about this little excercise when i get stuck up with my layout....
The shapes - Use the following shapes and create all possible layout
End of this excercise you will realise that you can do thousands of layout with just these 5 shapes... a friend from college had done about 3000 unique layouts out of these shapes...
The learning which I carry from this little lesson is that, today at work if i am assigned with a design work the moment i look at it, it is easy for me to visualize the end layout to an extend wihout even touching a piece of paper level and as I work on it gets better.
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Post me how many layouts you were able to do.
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