Alex Fine, a longtime adjunct instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, wanted to do more to help his students make the transition from the classroom to the real world. A freelance illustrator for magazines, Mr. Fine knows firsthand how competitive the business is; maybe he could give students a leg up, he thought, while putting a little more money in his own pocket.
He decided to start a small academy exclusively geared to fledgling illustrators who aspire to work in the field, in part to counter the ever-rising costs of a four-year art-school education, but also to reach people who want to learn only how to draw for publication.
Mr. Fine’s brainchild, the Baltimore Academy of Illustration, will hold its first class on September 14, on the second floor of a drab office building that sits in a small arts district in the northern part of the city. Dreamed up as an alternative to four-year art schools, but not as competition for them, it will not offer a degree.
“Illustration is an industry where you don’t need a degree,” says Mr. Fine, 36, whose work has appeared regularly in Newsweek, the New York Observer, Time, and The Washington Post. “I’ve done illustrating for 12 years. Never has anyone asked if I’ve been to school or where I went. They’re interested in your body of work.”
He and the two co-founders, both also longtime art instructors and working illustrators, got started with a $19,000 Indiegogo campaign designed to cover a year’s worth of overhead costs. They hope that the school will eventually draw enough prospective illustrators — incoming college freshmen, graduates, continuing-education students — to fill seven to nine classes per semester with 20 students each, and to establish a beachhead that churns out a steady stream of quality artists.
The school’s first semester will feature courses in the basics of illustration, as well as a more advanced course for those who have already started applying pen to paper. Classes on watercolor illustration, illustrating books, and editorial illustration will be offered, the last featuring assignments from art directors in the field. An “Illustration Conversation Workshop” will give students detailed feedback on their work and will serve as a professional primer. Students will learn tricks of the trade, such as setting pay rates, the best ways to catch the eyes and ears of art directors, and what to expect after they do.
Each class costs $500 and includes 14 weekly sessions of three hours each. Taking all six courses at the academy, which is not accredited and will hand out no certificates, would cost $3,000.
“It’s just the three of us as faculty, so our overhead will be pretty low,” says Mr. Fine, still an adjunct at the MICA, where he teaches illustration to sophomores (as does another founder, Jonathon Scott Fuqua, a veteran art teacher and award-winning author of several teen and young-adult novels).
The founders are careful to note that they aren’t looking to compete with MICA or any other degree-granting art college. Still, they point to the annual costs of those schools — from $35,000 to $55,000, when housing, supplies, and other expenses are added to tuition and fees — as a reason for starting up their own academy. (It’s not for nothing that eight of the 25 most expensive colleges in the United States are private art schools, according to the Department of Education.)
Art colleges do offer a broader range of education and amenities, the founders acknowledge.
“Our program doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a four-year school,” says Greg Houston, 49, the other founder, a former instructor at MICA, who is writing an illustration textbook. His work has landed in the pages of Marvel Comics, Texas Monthly, and The Village Voice.
“I believe in four-year programs. I think they’re wonderful. If you can afford to do it, you should. But not everybody can do that,” he says, adding that he’s still paying off loans he took on while studying at the Pratt Institute, from which he graduated in 1988.
For their part, private art colleges say small, unaccredited schools increase the chance that more people will get the art education they want. Larger colleges are used to sharing urban geography — and sometimes students — with small craft schools, design courses, and painting studios. At prominent four-year schools like MICA, enrollment continues to climb — a sign that they remain popular even as some skeptics have questioned the return on investment that students get.
“These pop-up academies in and of themselves pose no risk to traditional art schools,” says Gerry Snyder, a dean at the Pratt Institute. “I don’t see this academy coming into existence because of the overall expense of an art-school education, but because its founders see an opportunity to address a need while creating a streamlined process that yields more benefits for the part-time faculty.”
Likewise, MICA isn’t worried about the advent of the new academy. While noting that the art college’s illustration program attracts more applications than any other, Dionne McConkey, a spokeswoman, says, “MICA welcomes this alternative education model,” which it “doesn’t see as competition.”
Mr. Houston agrees with that assessment.
“I tell my partners the academy is a companion, a bridge, and an alternative,” he says. “It’s a bridge for people who want to come back to school for a class or two, a companion for four-year students who want to learn more about illustration, and an alternative for those who can’t afford a full program.”
Jon Weiner, who collected a bachelor-of-fine-arts degree from MICA in 2012, says he’ll attend courses at the Baltimore Academy of Illustration to knock off some rust, meet fellow artists, and hone his drawing skills, with an eye toward breaking into the profession.
“I’ve known Alex for years and have been handing some illustrations to him for critique,” says Mr. Weiner, who waits tables at a hotel restaurant downtown. “It was really important to me that the school will grant me access to art directors at real publications. In art school, you don’t get that kind of contact. Once you graduate, you can get kind of stale. This’ll be a good way for me to get reinvigorated.”
If the venture fails, it won’t be for a lack of passion or effort, says Mr. Fine. The founders have taken out full-page ads in a local weekly paper, cadged a table at a forthcoming TED conference here, and opened a website, while making plans to visit local high schools and neighborhoods in search of students.
“All three of us are madmen,” says Mr. Fine. “We’ll stay up all night to return emails and contact people. It’s really important to each of us that we do what we can to create the next generation of excellent illustrators.”
