The Summer Institute for Teens (SIT) is an intensive pre-university program featuring small classes taught by professional, practicing artists to prepare Urban Artists for the next step in their creative careers.
This immersive, one-month experience engages Urban Campers through intensive studio practice and visual culture. Studio practice is complemented by guest artist talks, in-class discussions and critiques, and field trips to engage with Vancouver’s diverse art and design community.

The program culminates with a public exhibition of student work in Emily Carr’s Michael O’Brian Exhibition Commons.

Bring your artwork to life through traditional and stop-motion animation. Create your 2D animations using original drawings and build vivid digital environments and characters using Adobe software. You will be introduced to fundamental animation principles and learn to observe and analyze movement in everyday life. Learn to consider timing, mass & volume, matter and rhythm towards creating realistic animated motion. Through hands-on exercises, you will gain experience with stop-motion and computer animation techniques and workflows and produce short films for your portfolio.

Investigate architecture and its surroundings through hands-on model-making, technical drawing and creative problem-solving in this practical studio course. You will consider buildings, spaces, and landscapes from a design perspective through intensive site analysis. You will become familiar with drafting tools and conventions and learn how to create plans, sections and architectural elevations, as well as how to translate those drawings into scale models. By the end of the program, you will have completed a site study and built a model for your portfolio.

Communication Design plays a significant role in our everyday lives, guiding interaction and communication in both physical and digital forms. In the Communication Design Studio, you will develop visualization skills and creative thinking through a mix of experiments in various forms and media. As you learn a visual language, design principles, and thinking methods, the program also provides experiences exploring contemporary issues and concepts and examining how designers contribute from commercial design to social awareness campaigns.

Express yourself by using programming to create digital media art and interactive designs. Expand your creative possibilities as you learn to understand programming as an artistic medium and become familiar with common web programming languages. Through​ a variety of projects, you will learn to develop interactive experiences for the web and apply programming concepts to create interactive web apps, generative art, and data visualizations. By the end of the program, students will have developed foundational coding and problem-solving skills, and be equipped to implement their creative design concepts using javascript and p5.js.

Explore narrative and visual storytelling as you shoot, edit and produce a range of work both individually and collaboratively. Learn the basics of screenwriting, storyboarding and directing as well as technical production skills. Discussions will focus on how video has evolved with new technology, audiences and platforms, as well as the influence of society and culture.

Explore how you see the world around you with traditional, technical and experimental drawing processes. Through various drawing methodologies investigate and apply a variety of drawing media and approaches to elevate your work and extend your comfort zone. Learn to work with graphite, ink, conté, charcoal and pastel as you further develop your technique and style. Create a variety of large-scale representational drawings, abstract compositions and sketches for your portfolio.

Bring your storytelling to the next level through game art + design! In this fun studio, you will learn the fundamentals of game design and how to communicate your ideas in this interactive medium. You will apply linear and non-linear storytelling techniques to develop a story concept and use visual design principles to develop the look and feel of your game. You will learn simple coding and programming skills to prototype game mechanics, develop creative problem-solving skills, become familiar with the design process as it applies to video games, and learn how to apply basic UX design methods to achieve a fun and positive user experience in your game.

Broaden your illustration knowledge and creative potential through various projects using traditional and digital media. Create detailed and stylized illustrations that communicate ideas, capture characters and envision imaginary spaces. Future illustrators, animators, graphic novelists or fine artists are invited to learn traditional and digital illustration techniques as they develop their style and grow their body of work.

Discover how sustainable and human-centred design can positively impact the world around us. This studio introduces the core values, application and potential of Industrial Design through prototyping and case studies of product design. You will learn technical drawing, CAD software, and model-making alongside principles of accessibility, ergonomics, material innovation and ecological concerns.

Investigate how observed and imaginary spaces can be represented with acrylic paint and mixed media. Challenge yourself to take new approaches to your work. Build technical skills through rigorous exercises in paint application, brush strokes, composition, and colour theory. Historical and contemporary practices will be considered.

Engage your creativity and expand your design skills in this exciting studio! Through practical assignments and design sprints, you will become familiar with the design thinking process, grow your visual literacy skills and learn to design through the lens of accessibility and usability to create engaging user experiences. You will learn to use observation, research and empathy to understand your user’s needs and use UX Design tools to build mock-ups to test the user experience of your designs. By the end of the program, you will be equipped with transferable problem-solving skills and a foundational understanding of how human-centred design can positively impact the world around you.

Artists and designers have the unique opportunity to impact communities and society. This innovative course introduces young creative practitioners to contemporary issues explored through a variety of art, media and design practices. Supported by in-class discussions and artist talks, students will consider the various intersections of politics, society and culture through the lens of art and design.

Professional Practice is a workshop- and lecture-based course that provides hands-on demonstrations, information and context for young artists, designers and media creatives to build their emerging practices. Students will learn and employ practical, cross-disciplinary skills as they explore the multitude of ways to work in art and design. Students will gain experience writing about creative practices and curating an art exhibition while exploring different career options in art and design. Students will also learn what it takes to create a strong portfolio.

Students from all studios are encouraged to join a committee in order to curate and organize the final event. The Exhibition, where everybody’s work and projects are displayed to the public.