Information About Correspondence Courses...

Q: I am really interested in doing some kind of correspondence course or long-distance education within the field of art. I'm 19 and am a self-taught traditional artist. I would like to take some kind of art program though. Does anyone know of any Drawing/Painting Courses that can be taken through correspondence? Also, its seems that most of the drawing and painting courses that I am finding are high school level. Can you take certain art courses at college level or do you have to go through all the art courses and get a degree there? Basically, I would love to find a program that assigns drawing/painting/pastel etc.. projects\tests and you have to complete them and mail them to an art teacher, he/she comments on them and you earn some type of certificate/degree.

A:You should find college-level courses at Penn State, U of Colorado at Boulder, Portland State U, the U of North Dakota, and Syracuse University. This info from Peterson's Independent Study Catalog, which lists all the home study courses at over 150 accredited universities. I took the inking and story graphics courses. I had opted for story graphics over penciling thinking

that the penciling course would be mostly basics and that what I really wanted was help in storytelling. Unfortunately, I fear that I may have gotten it backwards as the story graphics book appears really um... remedial. The inking course however seems quite good and I did pick up a few tricks from the video tape. I have only completed one assignment thus far, but look forward to seeing the critique on it. As a bonus I also sent the assignment to the APAs I am on (Capa-Alpha, Klordny, and APA-LSH) where there are several pros whom I hope will also provide critiques. I am most interested to see how their critiques differ from those of the Kubert School officials.