| Description |
This photo features the opening sign for the 2024 Illustration Capstone Show. Visitors were encouraged to draw on sticky notes at the front podium and add them to the gallery wall. The station was accompanied with the following text: "Welcome to the first ever Capstone Show for the University of Utah's new Illustration emphasis, a culmination of our students hard work over the past few years. The art on display represents a semester-long project where each student has chosen a central idea and crafted it into a unified body of work, to create a portfolio relevant to their future career in illustration. Illustration can look like anything; it can be any medium, size, or format. It is its purpose that defines it: telling stories, expressing ideas, and spreading messages in an accessible way. The irony of this show is that illustration doesn't belong in a gallery, but out in the world, scattered across a million surfaces where as many people as possible can enjoy it. Yet here we are. Visualizing articles or books, developing graphic novels, creating posters for events, animating music videos, inventing new worlds, designing characters and environments - these are some of the varied pursuits brought together here today. Among these projects is a shared story of 28 different artists, filled with critical thought, personal growth, and struggle with uncertainty (and deadlines). The Illustration Capstone Show is the product of a classroom full of artists channeling the wild thoughts of their imaginations into engaging stories. For the past few years, these artists have immersed themselves in the illustration process, building their stories atop a mountain of rejected ideas, crude sketches, and inspiration-fueled revisions. The best ideas have humble beginnings, and can start as a rough sketch on a small piece of paper. We invite you to start your own illustration journey on the wall to the right with whatever stray idea, drawn or otherwise, you can think up." |
