A one month basic introduction to Maya for 3D image-making. The class will introduce polygonal modeling, UV-mapping and normal-map generation, texturing, lighting, and advanced shader options, the Mental Ray renderer, and some particle, fluid and atmospheric simulators. Animation will not be taught beyond basics required for particle and other effects.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

This one-month workshop will explore the creative potential of ZBrush, the 3-D sculpting application from Pixologic. With so many uses, it's difficult to cover ZBrush completely, but by the end of the class you will have a solid understanding of the program, all its component tools and how to customize them and use them in your workflow, whether it's sculpting for game detail, animation, visualization, or rapid-prototyping. This workshop is a one-credit course that emphasizes skills and techniques. This class is part of a group of offerings by the departments of Illustration, Industrial Design and Graphic Design that are offered on Friday afternoons and are open to all students to facilitate cross-departmental enrollment.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

This course is a short introduction to the use of game engines for the production of realistic interactive environments-- whether for architecture, industrial design, VR, or animation. The class is intended for people who are already comfortable with 3D modeling and texturing and will cover the basics of scene creation, modeling, the particular requirements of PBR texturing, animation, and simple interactivity through the use of blueprints. Topics will include basic setup; import of 3D assets, including materials, animations, polygonal models, and custom hit-detection meshes; setup of input methods, lighting, sky-boxes, and atmospherics; and output to various devices. Professional workflow considerations and naming conventions will be covered, as well as an overview of useful third-party software for modeling and texturing.

Students must register for workshops during the registration period and add/drop regardless of start date of class.

Elective

This workshop will familiarize students with basic principles of graphic design while using Adobe InDesign as its formal playground. Exercises will be centered around the confluence of type and image, with a particular focus on editorial/publication contexts. The workshop will help students better understand the designerly contexts in which illustrated material often exists, how typography critically impacts those contexts and how the illustrations within them are perceived as a result. Assignments will range across a variety of print applications such as publication/editorial spreads, posters, zines, brochures, etc, in the form of guided in-class exercises that will familiarize them with layout design principles while training them in the technical use of InDesign. They will gain hands-on experience with InDesign’s key features—including master pages, typographic styles, grids, export settings, etc—to build print-ready layouts. The course will also place emphasis on print production literacy—introducing students to the technicalities of preparing files for print—color profiles, scale, resolution, paper stock, binding, large-format printing etc— and the logistics of working with print technicians. Students will be required to engage with the RISD Print Center to develop fluency in the practical processes and constraints of producing their own print-ready work, demystifying production workflows early in their academic careers. 

Note: students will need a laptop with RISD-provided Adobe InDesign installed for this workshop.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

Illustrators increasingly contribute to packaging and object-based design contexts, becoming powerful conveyors of brand vision and personality. This workshop will introduce students to the fundamentals of package design, with a focus on developing both technical proficiency and contextual sensitivity in designing for three-dimensional printed surfaces. Centered on Adobe Illustrator as the primary tool for vector-based design and professional production workflows, the course provides students with hands-on training in creating artwork for packaging across various formats and materials. Students will learn to think beyond flat compositions, exploring how illustration can activate, enhance, and interact with physical form. The workshop will be structured in the form of in-class guided exercises that involve creating dielines, applying artwork to 3D mockups, exploring surface design and patterning, and considering the relationship between illustration, graphic design, and interactivity. It will also compel them to conceptualize packaging in a holistic manner—understanding shelf appeal, incorporating regulatory content, creating typographic hierarchy, or considering nested artefacts like leaflets/instruction manuals. In addition to design development, the course will emphasize production constraints such as material selection, scaling and dimensioning, color fidelity, and the logistics of working with print vendors. The workshop will also require students to engage with the RISD Print Center to develop fluency in print-ready production. By the end, students will have produced a range of physical packaging prototypes for different contexts/objects, gaining appreciation for the relationship between illustration, graphic design and print production. 

Note: students will need a laptop with RISD-provided Adobe Illustrator installed for this workshop.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

This workshop introduces Illustration students to the fundamentals of branding and visual identity, with a focus on the illustrator’s role in shaping and supporting brand expression. The course demystifies industry terminology around branding and identity design—tone of voice, brand values and mission, audience positioning—offering hands-on experience in developing illustrated brand elements that are cohesive and responsive to a brand’s identity. The workshop will be structured in the form of in-class, guided exercises that revolve around real and fictional brand briefs, teaching them how to understand and adapt to a brand guideline and work across a range of sectors and tonal profiles—from playful to serious, minimalist to expressive. Using Adobe Illustrator as our primary tool, the workshop will place a particular emphasis on illustrating for logos and brand marks—students will learn how to create vector-based logos and supporting brand elements that are scalable, versatile, and visually aligned with a brand’s mission and personality. Many exercises will also include designing for print production, and students will be required to engage with the RISD Print Center. At the end of the workshop, students will have adapted to a variety of identity design contexts—logos, printed stationery/merchandise, web, social media, etc—that will sensitize them to the practical constraints of scalability and legibility when it comes to producing branded artefacts. 

Note: students will need a laptop with RISD-provided Adobe Illustrator installed for this workshop.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $50.00

Elective

WINTERSESSION 2026: Performance, Participation, Installation, and Transmedia Storytelling

Performance art includes various forms and histories, often taking a multidisciplinary approach. This course teaches students to turn ideas into performative acts and multi-sensory art installations. Students will explore narrative in performance and the ethics of participatory art while creating their own interactive works. Core principles emphasized include autonomy, non-maleficence, justice, and truth-telling. This course also examines the artist’s role in shaping audience experience in museums and galleries, focusing on participatory engagement and community-centered practices.

This studio elective - open to all RISD graduate students regardless of departmental affiliation-will address rotating topics and modes of making, thinking and discourse every semester. The structure and content of this course is designed to shift, enabling different topical investigations and a variety of expert faculty teaching special content in fall and spring of each year. This enables the flexibility for studio consideration of an ever-changing range of both topics and studio engagement. This course may be repeated for elective credit with permission of a student's graduate program director (GPD).

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Elective

This course delves into visual culture through first-hand encounters with illustrated exemplars held in the Special Collections at RISD Fleet Library, the Hay and the John Carter Brown Libraries at Brown University, and the Providence Athenaeum. Secondary research into the causes and conditions of their publication will help to illuminate the role of printed images in influencing opinion, and ultimately the shaping of societies. Seminar discussions will center on the nature of publishing in historic and contemporary contexts and consider the diverse ways that visual rhetoric circulates in culture, and is further mediated in institutional and cultural settings. Expository writing practice is key to this research seminar. Facilitated through our object-based study and under the guidance of faculty and Special Collections research librarians, students will develop several short essays and a final project in the form of a research document or format suitable for display. A final work summary will be part of a self-assessment prepared by the student. This class is required for students in the Illustration MFA program and open to all Graduates Students.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $25.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

A defining aspect of human consciousness is creation of meaning through the construction of narrative- a particularly potent mode of communication because it conveys information in a way that allows us to empathetically imagine the lives of others. Beyond the limitations of facts, polemic or data narrative entrances, narrative entertains and enriches us. As such, it is a basic element of Illustration. This class seeks to examine why and how stories matter in the context of traditional and contemporary world culture. We will explore how story construction, narrative voice, imagery, and choice of media intersect to create meaning and reach various audiences. We will look a broad scope of narrative strategies (linear, symbolic, interactive, etc.) from the revelations of the handmade artist's book to cutting-edge technology that is shaping narrative and its reception.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $25.00 - $150.00

Open to Graduate Illustration Students.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This course will deal with critical understandings of visual culture, narrative, and the melding of written and visual languages in contemporary graphic texts. We will begin with a study of visual culture, and some of the key issues, ideas, and questions that underlie thinking about visuality: its spaces and places; the politics of representation; theories of the spectator/audience; modes of reproduction and circulation of texts in the era of digitization and globalization. We will then consider theories of narratology, as they are particularly useful to a study of the graphic medium. For the final weeks of the semester, we will move to a consideration of some of the rich and varied criticism from within the field.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $260.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

In his 1909 An Essay in Aesthetics, Roger Fry talks about the moral purpose of art-to offer viewers the opportunity to experience emotion with objectivity. Rather than actually witnessing a terrible accident in a train station, in a film we are able to experience the event and its associated emotions without the urgency of response required if it were truly happening before us. We are able to feel and to observe ourselves feeling. While Fry was focusing on the experience of visual art, his description of purpose is precisely applicable to the writing of narrative fiction. The ultimate goal of storytelling is to share an experience or another world with a reader, and the focal point of that experience is the conjuring of emotion. This course will focus on the development of understanding and facility in the creation of emotion in fiction. We will address the basic structures of plot and conflict and move directly to the creation of work that will be presented in workshop. The discussion will focus on the writer's intent: their goals for the emotional and narrative experience for the reader.

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

As a culmination of the MFA program, this intensive studio challenges students to design and craft a significant, topically-focused body of work. Although students may choose creative formats and media according to their own interests, they must publish thesis work produced in class. Publication through digital platforms (podcasts, websites, apps, etc.) will be coordinated with analog forms when possible and appropriate to the project. Together with the research and writing produced in ILLUS 606G Paradigms and Contexts: Publishing the Thesis and Beyond, a comprehensive body of work and a written thesis document will be produced.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00 - $1,500.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

This seminar supports the work of the Thesis Studio IV by providing a formal class setting in which to create written reflections on one's evolving studio thesis work as well as-more broadly-writings on illustration practice. Sessions will center on discussion of assigned readings as well as written responses to classmates' essays. These exercises will scaffold a more expansive documentation of their Studio Thesis Project, and to serve as a forum for discussion of critical writing about contemporary illustration practice that will support an essay to be contributed to the groups final publication.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $0.00 - $150.00

Major Requirement | MFA Illustration

What if buildings could breathe, furniture could grow, and materials could heal themselves? What if the future of design wasn’t plastic or concrete—but alive? This hands-on, immersive course explores the fascinating world of bio-materials, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in sustainable design.

Students will delve into natural materials like bamboo, mycelium-based products, algae-based substances, and hempcrete—materials that not only reduce ecological footprints but also offer innovative structural and aesthetic potential. Through field visits, lab experiments, real-time material testing, and design challenges, they will explore how these materials evolve, decay, and adapt in response to different conditions.

A key component of this course is hands-on experimentation. Students will cultivate mycelium, mix and pour hempcrete, and bend bamboo to its limits. They will analyze the origins, properties, and life cycle impacts of these materials, gaining a deeper understanding of their role in environmental sustainability and innovation.

By the end of this course, students will have developed foundational knowledge of bio-materials and their applications, equipping them with the skills to rethink materiality in design. Whether creating artworks, products, or structures, students will be encouraged to use imagination to break boundaries and design for a future where nature and innovation collide.

Estimated Cost of Materials: $100.00

Elective

Topics in Exhibition and Narrative Environments II follows upon INTAR-2102 and continues the exploration of the principles of exhibition from curatorial matters, experience design, narrative creation, graphic design, new media, user participation, installation, site specificity, production, etc. Topics II will conclude with the selection of a potential Thesis subject.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Exhibition and Narrative Environments

This course focuses on the hands-on process of designing and constructing exhibitions. Students will explore the key elements of exhibition design, including spatial planning, material selection, lighting, signage and way-finding. They will also be exposed to standard fabrication and printing techniques commonly used within the industry.

Working collaboratively, students will design and build exhibits, moving from concept development to the physical installation. Emphasis is placed on real-world problem-solving, project management, and understanding the technical aspects of exhibition construction.

The course will culminate in fully realized exhibits giving the students opportunities to engage the public and share their work. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $50.00

Elective

Interior Architecture and the work of adaptive reuse pose a challenge: To understand an existing idea, concept, materiality, and context, which then becomes the starting point for architectural transformation. The origin may be ill-used or obsolete; the challenge is to knit together that which exists, with newly created form and materiality. Through a series of intertwined projects students will use multiple hand hewn modalities to draw and model proposals. This introductory studio is not designed for students with prior architectural training.

Elective

This course further develops design principles from the first semester and introduces students to methodological thinking in the relationship between context, scale and use. Real site situations are introduced and students develop individual design processes associating topological relationships between the interior and exterior, at multiple scales of interventions. Students will have the opportunity to explore design issues through both traditional and computer generated design.

Major Requirement | BFA Interior Studies

This course provides students with an opportunity to study how distinct building systems are constructed to form a comprehensive whole. Through case studies, students will examine approaches to integrating a variety of systems, such as structural, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, acoustic, and communication systems. This course will focus on how interior architecture interfaces with existing buildings; the case studies will be of recent works that have altered existing building. Students will be required to use the shop and computers to execute their individual and group assignments.

Major Requirement | MDes Interior Studies Adaptive Reuse

The objective of this class is to employ digital techniques in spatial design. Students successfully completing this course should be able to develop sophisticated digital layouts with image processing software, create 2D architectural drawings and 3D models, and develop a 3D visualization of a design. In this course, we will also discuss the integration of 2D and 3D data, digital materials, as well as the basics of digital lighting and camera work.

Major Requirement | BFA Interior Studies