BYU Environmental Design Course Teaches Students Through Outdoor Observation
On a brisk Monday morning, students in the Environmental Design course stand among the scenic fall leaves and mountains in the Alpine Loop. This class, taught in the Department of Design at BYU, aims to teach students how to build worlds through painting.
“In most narrative art, there is usually a character and a background,” illustration professor Justin Kunz said. “This class is a chance to focus on the background. They apply color theory, understand lighting and develop a better sense of composition. It draws their attention toward the importance of setting to create a mood and a feeling.”
Environmental Design is considered a sister class to Character Design. Together, the courses train illustration students to handle both storytelling pillars: the figure and the place. In practice, that means students are expected not just to draw a tree or a mountain, but to understand how that tree or mountain tells part of the story.
“One of the benefits about teaching at BYU is I can say God is the greatest artist,” Kunz said. “The more you observe, the more you realize how amazing His creation is. There are little miracles happening all around us. The world is dynamic. The light is never static.”
Students said that attitude shapes how they work.
“The best part of this course is to be able to understand and interpret what we see around us,” illustration student Jack Beck said. “We are not robots just copying the environment, we are interpreting it.”
Another student, Nicole Salisbury, said that process changes how she looks at the world even outside of class.
“We take things in differently than they actually are,” she said. “You look at a mountain and think it is obviously brown. However, when you try to actually match the color, it is a lot more blue. There are actually all these different colors that you would not recognize without testing the various shades of paint. This class is learning how all that works, and how to translate it onto a canvas.”
Working on site also forces speed and decisiveness. The sun moves, clouds pass, shadows collapse and then reappear at a new angle. Students do not have the luxury of fussing over tiny branches for three hours.
“It is challenging, in a way. We are outside and standing for a long time, but you learn a lot of patience doing it. You also learn how to work quickly with the environment because the lighting changes throughout the process. You are trying to capture what you see in that moment,” illustration student Andria Johnson said.
That fast, direct approach is intentional. Kunz teaches a method he describes with French terms students toss around casually: premier coup (“first touch”) and en plein air (painting in open air). Instead of building up thin layers over weeks like a Renaissance studio, students work wet-into-wet. They block in the biggest shapes with a big brush, then refine.
“Hang in there and simplify,” Beck said. “You could spend your whole time painting a couple little rocks and trees and trying to nail all that detail. But if you simplify and nail the big stuff first, you realize a lot of those little details didn’t actually matter.”
That mindset translates to confidence. Kunz said one of his main goals is to make sure students leave the class unafraid of space.
“Before this class, sometimes they just want to draw a thing and they are not really conscious of the whole space they are composing,” he said. “When they come out of this class, they have a lot more confidence dealing with the entire composition. If you can go outside and just paint a random place where your professor takes you, you can kind of paint anything.”
Jack Beck learned this very thing. He said, “Just start. Just do it. No one is going to tell you that you are qualified. The only way you can know what you are doing is to just do it a lot. Practice all the time.”
