I am a recently graduated art student (2 years ago) and am pretty disgusted by this thread.
Personally, I did not spend college smoking pot, drinking, and wasting away talking about fartsy-artsy stuff. Art students have a bad reputation as being lazy and 'out there', when in my experience most of us are obsessively driven. You will never meet someone more dedicated to what they do than a good artist.... The key word there is good. There's a lot of people who wade through artschool, but then there are a lot of people who wade through engineering school too (the bullshitters). College kids are college kids no matter where you go.
I now work full time as a professional video game artist have have many college buddies now working in films, games, television, comic books, and magazine/book illustration.
Most art school students go to art school in order to help them break into the entertainment industry, and it helps.
Believe it or not most art students, at least the successful ones, spend their time talking about....well....art. And I don't mean fancy pants artsy art stuff like "do you feel this painting".. that's all a lame ass stereotype. Sure, you see that from time to time, particularly if the college is a more thematic one, or you have a teacher who was never employed outside of the gallery circuit, but that's NOT why 95% of the students are there. They dream about being the next miyasaki, adrian carmack, phil tippet, andrew jones, jim lee, or genndy tartakovsky. They are idealists, dreamers, and ambitious. Just like most of the writers on these boards--they want to actually DO something they care about.
Anatomy, perspective, color, form, skill, technique, tools, ability, contacts, networking, inspirations, composition, pacing, storyboards, all of those are frequent topics.
Also, art school is competitive. Fiercly. The best students do not party. They do not do anything, ever, other than work and study-from when they wake to when they sleep. They are art dorks. Only a handful of students get picked up after artschool by the dream companies and if you're not the best it won't be you. Even then, most of those people will discover that the dream companies aren't what they expected and will leave them for smaller companies within a year or two.
In many cases the teachers are either extremely skilled, and everyone respects them, or have been wading through art life themselves, and no one respects them. The wading teachers will be young themselves, having gone through grad school within the last few years. Oftentimes the best students in the class are far more skilled the those teachers.
My personal experience: I'm more middle of the line- skilled enough to be professional and respected, not skilled enough to become famous. This is true of a lot of people who come out of art school. Unlike many though, I can say I'm good enough to be in my industry of choice, video games, working on a AAA title though. The same cannot be said of a lot of graduates.
A LOT of graduates find their way into web or corporate design. This is much to the chagrin of the actual design students, who can be a little more toward the stereotype of 'artsy' and they resent illustration or 3d majors creeping on their toes...but basic design is kind of considered the grunt position of the art world. Everyone's done it. The jobs are easy to find and plentiful. Hell, there are so many of those jobs out there that you don't even need the degree to get them. It's just not a fun job.
The other 'fallback' job is teaching. It's sad that usually the worst students go on to teach, but it's true. Those who can--do. Those who can't--teach. Finding a good art teacher is rare, and I was lucky enough to have several.
my personal college experience, the student personalities worked a little like this;
design majors = VERY political. There were a lot of activist designers, though they were on both sides of the political spectrum. If they weren't talking design they were talking politics. Things would get pretty heated with them. It was a weird blend.
animation majors = VERY idealistic. They all wanted to break into cartoons and film, which are both very hard markets to break into. Cartooning is a dying medium, and I'm not sure how hard it is to get into.. but I've only got a few pals who have successfully broken in..and none of them have optimistic stories about the inside world. They spend a lot of time watching cartoons, duh. Most animation these days is done in flash or 3d, but animation students still spend a lot of time drawing too.If the college has a good animation program, these guys will spend every waking minute drawing. keep in mind that one second of traditional animation = 24-30 frames. If a teacher assigns you a ten second clip; you're looking at 300 very accurate drawings. Animators lose their hair early.
3d majors = this are the most pessimistic of the art students. There will be one or two really skilled people in every class, but most people, even those skilled at other disciplines, will be fighting the 3d programs. 3d applications take a LONG time to learn, and oftentimes the teachers themselves don't have a great handle on it. It's a tech hurdle that oftentimes defeats the students before they even set out. Most of these guys want to work in games or film FX. This is where I fit in. We all look pale and pasty and have a monitor tan. We dont like lights. We bridge the gap between nerdy and creative, not quite being either.
illustration majors - These guys are, mostly, really humble. It's weird, because overall I'd say these were the most skilled students in my school. They go on to illustrate children's books, comic books, magazines, book covers, etc. These are the realist painters and are damn good at what they do. But, there's ALWAYS someone better than them, and you can tell from a glance, and that'd be pretty crippling I guess.
film majors - one of the most obsessive disciplines. If theyre not filming, theyre editing. if theyre not editing, theyre organzing a shoot. If they're not doing any of those, theyre watching movies. There's nothing else in these peoples lives and they like it that way.
scupture and painting - this was the more stereotypical artsy group. They got stuff in galleries and had openings with wine and cheese. They did party more than other art students, but not hardly as much as your average frat kid. These people are not 'skilled' in the same way the other majors are, but still can be very good at what they do. And there will always been a few painting majors who can spar with the illustrators in terms of raw realism, but most of them prefer to go a more abstract route. And even at the parties these guys were talking art or politics or current events. most of them try to find a unique political spin to put on their artwork. Artwork that these guys make is NOT neccesarily totally abstract, it'll just be weird and usually is trying to say something political. There is no more 'artsy for the sake of being artsy' anymore. Thats a gross stereotype. there's either artsy to be controversial or artsy to be political. They'll probably try the gallery circuit for a year and then move on into web design or grad school. Personally I don't have a high opinion of these majors on a whole, but even among them there were some truely talented---truely driven--- students and teachers.
interior design, fashion, art history - I never knew too many people in these majors, but it's where all the cute girls seemed to be.
industrial design -- we didnt have this major, but this is where a lot of concept artists come out of. They spend a lot of time drawing. They're smart.
anyway..if you planning on writing a story about art students you should really go do more research. My experiences are based off of a pretty competitive school and are pretty standard for what you'll get with most hardcore art schools these days (risd, ringling, etc). If you have any specific artschool questions, shoot me a pm.
