Shadow Dance with Justine Mara Andersen
Let us reclaim our fantasies, free them from censure and make some wicked cool art!
Please read this prior to enrolling:
Justine has a spent a lifetime exploring, studying and creating work that is romantic in spirit, phantasmagoric, erotomaniacal, fantastical and unapologetically authentic. Her passions and work are as highly influenced by exploitation cinema as by fairy tales. In this class she will be sharing less an expertise and more a celebratory passion for the gems she has discovered. She is inviting you to into a deep well of passion, into the shadows where authentic fantasies lie.
Unfortunately there has of late been an effort to sanitize, infantilize and tame our fantasies, to force, and enforce, them into line with political ideals, and this is neither possible nor healthy. Fantasies devoid of eros and the shadow are sterile and bloodless.
Fantasies are alchemical, the gold we create from base materials, and we cannot tame or force them into molds anymore than we can force them away. Efforts to disregard this are dangerous, leading to unhealthy feelings of shame and isolation. We need to relearn how to tell fantasy from reality. Come prepared to explore spicy pulps, Giallo's, Exploitation Cinema, Sword & Sorcery, adult comics and illustration... welcome to the Grand Guignol!
Let us reclaim our fantasies, free them from censure. And let's start making some wicked cool art!
Content:
1) Videos: Students will gain access to in-depth videos celebrating her exploration of pulps, comics, illustration, fairy tales, exploitation cinema and romantic fantasy. Many of the videos will contain personal stories of her talks with directors and artists... amazing stuff!
2) Zoom calls: Weekly live calls, will be scheduled on different days and times each week so everyone will get a chance to find some that fit into their schedules.
3) Alter Ego Creation: Students will learn to create an alter ego who can safely navigate their fantasies, allowing them to explore dangerous places they would not care to tread in real life.
4) Prompts: Prompts will be shared to keep the students full of ideas to explore.
5) Community: A place to post and discuss and critique your work, yes, Justine will participate.
CONTENT WARNING: This class will be R-rated, and will explore images and concepts that do contain adult themes and eroticism, some of which are controversial in nature. She will not give warnings or apologize for the content of the films and images discussed. NO politics will be tolerated in the class (left, right or center), and one rule above all... absolutely NO FANTASY SHAMING!
Initial Schedule
First Zoom call
Students will have access to the first video(s) immediately.
The First Zoom Call is scheduled for
- May 5, 7 pm Eastern
Justine will work with students to schedule more live calls to accommodate everyone's schedules
Instructor(s)
Instructor Bio:
SURPASS YOUR LIMITS.
Hey, I'm Justine, and I've been with SAW from the beginning. Before SAW I was a veteran pro... but before that, I, presumably, like you, had no idea where to begin. I had ambition, hunger, desire, but no focus, no discipline, no chops, and worse, no mentors. I knew what I wanted, but I also knew how lousy I was and how little I knew, and worse, that no one at college was qualified to help me learn what I really needed to know.The worst part was, I was so ignorant when it came not only to art, but to comics, that I was drowning in my own naivete. I didn't know where to begin...
Then I met my mentors, P. Craig Russell, Val Mayerik, Dan Adkins, Jim Steranko, Frank Thorne, John Workman, and Jeff Jones. At first it was brutal, I was immediately confronted with the shameful realization that I didn't know a damn thing bout drawing, nor about comics, and I suddenly felt an urgent need to get it together and get down to the hard work of learning the hard stuff, of learning the discipline of setting aside the fun stuff to focus on fundamentals.
Then, for decades, I worked 60 hours a week, I made a lot of sacrifices, and did every damn thing my mentors told me to do. In that time, I completed 4 published graphic novels for Fantagraphics, inked for DC Comics, Image Comics, and created hundreds of illustrations for WOTC/Dungeons & Dragons, as well as for Lucasfilm, and countless more images for numerous clients in a wide range of projects from ballet stage design to animation.
It's my philosophy that most of my students have set the bar too low for themselves, that they have no idea just how good and how BIG they can become as artists, if only they make wise conscious choices.
What I excel at is saving my students time and suffering. I learned it the hard way so my students don't have to. Of all the gifts I have, perhaps the one I am most proud of is my ability to take complicated concepts and distill them into something I can pass along to my students. My students not only learn from my successes, but my failures, and if you learn from me, you are not only learning from me, but you will be learning all my mentors taught me.
Through me, they and my own life lessons will all be teaching you together, and not just how to draw good comics, but about how to prioritize, set achievable goals, and how to avoid temptation and learn the discipline it takes to become great rather than merely good.
My website is barefootjustine.com
