Krita courses at Activdesign

Save Point − A concept-art demo from the digital painting class I taught, sources and high resolution on Pepper&Carrot Misc gallery

I gave courses for Activdesign, a French CG school teaching design, video-game and web-dev. It's a school using Free/Libre software, that's so cool!. That's also why I accepted to teach for them.

The course started in January and was split into 10 sessions of 1h30 each, happening every thursday in the last part of the morning.

Over the ten courses I gave; I explained the role of imagination and picturing things, thumbnailing, references hunting and licenses, drawing, volumes, perspective, and then courses on rendering and shading. It was also mainly a workshop, so a period of time used by the students to practice.

I taught remotely from my desk at home with my mic and webcam. Because even if the school is located in France, it was too far away from my home to go weekly over there. To give you and idea, it's easily located at more than a 6h train distance.

The school used their own Jitsi server for the visio, and Jitsi rooms were integrated around a larger central hub managed by Mattermost. Thanks to a cool setup proposed by the school, I was able to launch a Jitsi meeting directly from Mattermost chat with a button. Everything was smooth, I was impressed how easy it was for teachers and students to use that. Bravo. The Jitsi room was always ready 5 minutes before the course. I had a webcam view on the classroom, but it was also possible for the students to attends from their home (or anywhere with Internet).

I recorded the sessions with OBS also for offering a possibility to get a replay in case someone miss a course. The school gave me a sFTP access to upload the courses. I'm sure I'll have requests here on the blog to ask me to share these files or upload the replays: but I don't want that. I don't want the raw recordings of the session I made to go public even if ActivDesign gave me authorisation to do it. It's mainly because it's very long (15h! 2.7GiB) and it's in French.

That's why my plan is to try soon to adapt my ten courses into shorter videos for my channel. I painted for these courses many examples from scratches, and it was with this plan in mind so I can then get materials I can reuse under the license of my choice for my own future videos. These weekly deadlines to prepare my courses/demo-files/examples were great motivators to have finally a longer course format done.

A big thanks again to the students for enduring my long monologues courses 😆 and Activdesign for the invitation!