Wigolia - the School of Creative Wizardry - will be a school that embraces the digital world (with technology and all those good things), but doesn't forget the old world (fine craftsmanship, working with one’s hands, and the like.) A school that makes high quality art education both accessible and affordable. It's a place for beginners young and old - that delights in the creative wizard inside each of us.

Where did the name come from? Years back, I was looking to buy a domain for my personal design website. Thankfully nothing was available with my own name in it, so I started making up words. One of which was Wigolia. I was working at a Farmer’s Market at the time, so the word itself stems from Weigila. And there you have it!

A college education is expensive and great teachers for specific fields are sometimes hard to find unless you live in a certain area, choose the right school, have the right connections, or enough money. High schools often cut art budgets first, and many young people never have the opportunity to explore their creative aspirations at the time they are most eager to learn. Life happens, then time seems to run thin and we get stuck on a career path that may not be our inner spark. The web is opening up doors of possibility for education, and Wigolia looks to take this possibility to the next level.

The course will be delivered through the Wigolia website. Lessons will be taught in a video-based format. The course is planned to be comprised of 10 sections with 5 videos each for a total of 50 videos, or as many videos as we feel are necessary for an effective course. Scott (from the video) will teach the course, and it will be reviewed by a team of advisors—known as the Wigolia Trust—where great measures will be taken to ensure quality.

Some things you will be learning about in the course:

Tools and Mark Making, Contour Drawing, Using Basic Shapes, Using Angles, Gesture, Drawing Basic Analysis of Form, Sketching, Simple Perspective, etc.

We plan to charge $25 a month for access to the site or $100 for a six month subscription. By helping out and supporting Wigolia in these early stages you'll get more art goodness for your dollar. See the rewards and their associated subscription to your right.

So far I have recruited a great team who've been working with me to launch Wigolia. Together we've been focused on the design of the Wigolia site and overall organization of the courses. I have previously taught an online drawing course via Reddit and have had training at various art institutions including Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY), and the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I've also begun getting connected with other artists to get their feedback and input. This I will continue to do for the drawing course and future course at Wigolia.

The funds will be used to purchase my own high quality video camera to record the courses, help pay for video and web hosting, pay for drawing and resource materials, and allow me to open time to work on the project.

Wigolia will be comprised of many more courses in the future. I'm running this Kickstarter so I can get started with the first course Fundamentals of Drawing. If I am able to raise more than $5000, funds will be used to accelerate the development of the Fundamentals of Drawing Course and kickstart future courses. Courses planned for the future include:

1. Graphic Design
2. Storytelling
3. Web Engineering (HTML/CSS/JS)
4. Typography
5. Storyboarding
6. Writing

We updated the video to give new visitors more clarity on what the project was all about. But, you can still view the original video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3diA801b7Y