What I Did on My Summer Vacation: CSUDH's Youth Camps Deliver Art and Fun

While California State University, Dominguez Hills students are enjoying the summer off or attending one or two summer classes, the campus remains abuzz with activity. Numerous summer camps and programs through the College of Extended Education (CEE) offer area youth of all ages everything from sports training to exploring careers in two of the things that kids love the most: comic books and video games.

During the summer camp in cartooning and fine arts held last month, campers learned basics such as drawing from life, using various mediums including watercolor and charcoal, as well as how to write humor and draw cartoons. Twelve students from elementary, middle and high schools across the country were taught by nationally syndicated cartoonist Eric Teitelbaum, whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker.

Stacey Lee, a 12th-grader from Portsmouth Abbey School in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, attended the camp mainly to improve her drawing as a hobby.

“I want to be an architect or a surgeon,” she says. “Knowing how to design is key in architecture, so this training would help in that field. My father is a surgeon, and he draws very well. He sees a connection between drawing and performing surgery and how it helps you with good hand techniques, so I think it would help me in that field.”

Gyasi Rowe is in a humanities magnet program at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles and looks forward to drawing cartoons for the school’s newspaper in the fall. Inspired by his father’s artistic ability as well, the 10th-grader hopes to become a graphic artist or an animator.

“My dad caricatures people, or he’ll draw the actual person,” he says. “He’s a psychologist; it’s his hobby. In my spare time, my dad and I will just sit together and draw for a while.”

Teitelbaum is co-creator with his brother, Bill Teitelbaum, of the new “Pink Panther” comic strip, which appears in leading newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times Sunday comics section. The brothers began their cartooning careers by providing illustrations for their stockbroker father’s foray into humor writing.

Although Lee and the other campers were excited to learn Image Ready computer animation, Teitelbaum underscores the importance of learning basic drawing techniques and design principles.

“It’s not just a matter of getting in front of Photoshop and thinking it’s going to do the job,” says Teitelbaum of teaching time-honored techniques to a computer-savvy generation of aspiring artists. “You have to be able to design characters, show the nuances of a blink and interpret a script, so these are important skills to have.”

Continuing to encourage young people to enter creative fields, CEE will present the second session of its video game art and design camp August 6-9 on the Dominguez Hills campus. Campers will be introduced to techniques in flash animation, character design, illustration and special effects. Computer graphics will also be taught using Adobe Photoshop, which is used by industry professionals to create logos, movie posters and CD covers. Designer Robert Dillworth will instruct at the video game art and design camp. His industry credits include projects for Warner, Sony and Rhino Records.

For more information on the video game camp and other CEE programs, click here.

- Joanie Harmon

Photos above, top to bottom: Gyasi Rowe of Los Angeles "hands in" his life drawing skills at Extended Education's cartooning camp.

Syndicated cartoonist Eric Teitelbaum teaches the basics of drawing and humor to elementary, middle and high schoolers who attended the cartooning camp from across the country.

All photos by Joanie Harmon