The Last Airbender, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, comes out on July 1. But I will not be seeing it, because the casting choices made for this movie are too incredibly offensive, and I refuse to spend any money in support of it. If you don’t know about the controversy, go to racebending.com.
Still, I’m on a rather big Avatar: The Last Airbender kick right now, so I decided to try a bit of fanart of Katara. In the TV series, the Water Tribe culture is based on arctic Inuit cultures, so I styled Katara with this reference in mind. She looks a bit too old, so I might give it another try later.
Uh… posting on my blog reminds me… I have to finish modeling my cat!
I could be doing anything with my time right now. I could be drawing. I could be writing. I could be watching movies.
Instead, I am modeling a cat.
And I’d be worried that this could mean I actually enjoy modeling… but really I think it’s more an indicator of how much I like cats.
But I am getting a bit of 2D experimentation in…
I just read a novel series called The Queen’s Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. It’s so, so good! It makes me feel so inspired, like I need to be writing and creating great stories.
I just haven’t figured out what I want to say, yet.
School is officially OVER!! And (grades pending) on Friday I walk across the stage. That means it’s time to get back to some long-awaited drawing. This is just a quick thumbnail for a scene.
So I’m working on my thesis process DVDs, and as I’m looking through my files I happen upon this piece of horror from the summer that I pushed to the deepest dregs of my memory. This dude, older than my dad (and my dad’s old enough to be my granddad, btw), was straight up feeling me up and propositioning me on the bus. Every morning. It got so bad I had to change my schedule to avoid him. If there’s one thing I took away from L.A., it’s that it sure has some interesting people. And apparently they all need lovin’.
In any case. One more week of school. Two more weeks till graduation.
I’m really into Within Temptation right now… well, just the one song. But it’s a good song.
It’s Render Week here in the Computer Animation department: seniors are rendering final versions of their films. We’re almost done!
When I come home at night, I’ve been trying to work on a longish sequence of storyboards that I developed for Independent Study last semester. My hope was to get some revisions in in time for recruiter visits (Nickelodeon comes next week…), but tonight my head’s just not in it. I’m not sure I’ll be done in time.
Rather than trying for a second wind, here’s some drawrin’s.
Don’t mind Travis’s dialogue. He’s a country kid.
Can that boy’s mouth get any bigger…
This panel’s kinda fun to me, for some reason… though a bit busy.
A couple of these shots didn’t make it into the final. Here’s one of them.
In some cases I have trouble settling on staging, or hitting it just the way I want it. So I’ll try a few variations until I get something I like.
Still trying.
That horse’s neck bothers me… I really don’t know why I drew it like that.
All right, shower, then bed. I’m really tired of going to the labs at 9 a.m….
So lighting critique is over, and the beat goes on.
I’m a notoriously light sleeper (thanks to an incident at my first college). Thus, just a tiny bit of sound at 3:30 in the morning has me awake and unable to fall back asleep.
I’m taking a Creative Writing class this semester, in which we’re reading Stephen King’s On Writing. He starts the book in an unconventional way; not with his thoughts on how to become a writer, but with a short memoir of the events that led to him being a writer. At 3:30 in the morning, I found myself thinking about some of the moments I remember when I think about my path to art. Continue reading →
So last week I was cleaning out my Hood College e-mail account – Hood being my second college, for those who don’t know (yep, Ringling’s my third!). I don’t open it often; it’s the account I use for Facebook, so mostly it’s full of notifications. But in cleaning it up, I found an e-mail from October, from my old art professor. This is the woman who got me to apply to Ringling. She wanted to know how I was doing. I don’t think I’ve spoken to her since I enrolled at Ringling.
After graduating Hood in 2005, and while struggling to find steady work, I thought maybe it was a good time to start looking at animation programs. Animation was what I’d always wanted to do, since I was a teenager, but life doesn’t always work out the way you intend.
My art professor had been demanding and pushed me hard while I was at Hood, and I didn’t always see eye to eye with her. But she’s the first person I went to when I needed advice on putting together my portfolio. I told her I was considering CalArts as my first choice.
She said, “You have to go to Ringling.”
I have a history of running away from challenges. Often I’m presented with great opportunities, and too often I say “no.” It’s only in the last few years that I’ve been encouraging myself to say “yes” more and more.
So this past semester, I’ve been looking back on the last few years with something very close to disbelief. I said these words in a blog post nearly three whole years ago:
The most important thing is that now I can tell my boss that yes, I will be leaving near the end of July.
Yes, I’m moving to Florida.
Yes, I’m going to art school… again.
I’m deliriously happy and scared out of my mind, all at once.
I don’t think the reality of what I’m doing really hit me until this year. Sometimes I have to say it in my head, just to assure myself it’s true. Yes, I did move to Florida. Yes, I did go to art school. Yes, after fifteen years of longing, I’m pursuing my dream. I didn’t just say I’d do it and then chicken out this time.
And it’s pretty cool to think about it. All the times I thought maybe I’d made a mistake in enrolling at Ringling. That maybe I wasn’t cut out for animation. That maybe I was wasting my money and my time, and I’d be more comfortable if I’d stayed where I was.
In four months, I will be graduating from Ringling College of Art and Design. No clue what I’m going to do just yet. But now, at least, I’m facing the future with one less mystery. Yes, I can animate. And I can survive as a creative. That’s one door that’s no longer locked to me.
I don’t have to live the rest of my life wondering “what if”. Three years of intense pain and suffering at the unfeeling hands of the Ringling CA curriculum are worth it just for that.
