Like so many other accepted students before me, I was not able raise the funds to attend CalArts this September. Instead, I had to defer for a year. The school gives accepted students this option, and I can imagine a lot of people use it due to the difficulty in raising the funds. Despite the fantastic scholarship CalArts awarded me (I take back what I said earlier about the lack there of), and my own savings and loans, there still wasn’t enough to cover tuition. While it’s dissapointing that I won’t get to start school with the fantastic people I got to know from Animated Buzz through the process of preparing our portfolios, I’m looking forward to next year, and I will be diligently preparing for my opportunity over the next year and a half.
This doesn’t really come as a surprise; I knew what I was getting into, but at least I can say I tried everything, to the extent of throwing myself under the bus according to some people, to make it happen. If you haven’t guessed, I’m referring to my Cartoon Brew appeal. A lot of positives came out of that, but it still amazed me the extent to which people can assume and make snap judgements. Maybe in that respect, I am naive. So here’s the lesson learned: A good deal of people naturally draw conclusions and assume the worst. People will tell you what you can and cannot do because it’s easy. From a few paragraphs of text on the internet, people will attempt to define you. You can’t listen to them. You have to follow your heart and do what you want to do. If the pioneers and revolutionists of our industry have taught us anything, it’s that nothing is impossible, it just seems that way (Raul da Silva). And while I wasn’t able to raise the funds to go this September, I have by no means failed at anything. I have networked with so many positive people in the industry that enjoy their work that I am more confident than ever moving forward.
So now what?
Well now I have about a year and a half of straight work ahead of me. Just like the nine months I put into preparing my accepted portfolio, learning to experiment with color and story in my figure drawing, I’m going to dedicate this time to similar intense study. Except this time, I’ll be studying animation and character design up the wazoo. I’ll also be doing a lot of film analysis, which I really enjoy. This all bodes well for the content of this blog, so stay tuned because I will be posting a lot of work in the coming year.
Ironically, this is actually quite an exciting time for me. I’m still aiming for the same goal as always, but now I have CalArts in my back pocket for next year. The one crucial element that I will be missing is being surrounded by like-minded peers. An environment like that is gold, because everyone pushes each other to their respective extremes. The absence of that will only make me work harder.
So far I’ve recieved $350 in donations from you guys. You’re all so generous. I’ve put this information in the bar on the right, and I’ll update it as I go in case anyone is interested in checking my progress.
Keep in mind I haven’t included any scholarships, grants, bursaries, or local donations yet (Not to mention family support). I have just applied to an enormous grant of $10,000 which I’m really excited about. It’s the only one I’ve been able to find of that size, so while I’m trying not to get my hopes up, could you imagine if I got it? That could make all the difference. The waiting period is 1 to 6 months. Let’s hope it’s 1 and not 6.
Thank you William, Justin, Jeremy, Paul, Amid, and Jerry for your generous donations. I can’t thank you enough for your support.
To anyone else that is considering donating a dollar or two, but is skeptical because of the amount of internet scams out there, you can click the image on the left to see my acceptance letter.
This is the exact portfolio that I sent to CalArts in the exact order. Which reminds me, I have to phone them and get that back. I will post my sketch book work when I get them back from the school as well.
In the meantime here’s a few links to some older work, some of which didn’t make the final portfolio cut:
So I got into CalArts. But it remains to be seen if I’ll be able to raise the money to go.
[insert sob story here]
Check out the bar on the right if you want to help. I would really appreciate it. I just finished my copy of Walt Disney: An American Original, and I stumbled upon this quote from Walt Disney:
The trouble with universities is that they restrict students from learning about a lot of things. The young people have to get so many credits toward their degree, and they don’t have a chance to delve into other subjects. That won’t be true at CalArts. Students will be able to take anything – art, drama, music, dance, writing. They’ll graduate with a degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts, and if they want a Bachelor of Arts they can go to another colleges and get a few more credits…The student body of CalArts shouldn’t be over two thousand, and as many as possible should reside on campus. There should be some allowance for those who are talented. yet are not students; they should be able to express themselves without worrying about grades. There will be a lot of scholarships at CalArts. We don’t want any dilettantes at CalArts. We want people with talent. That will be the one factor in getting in to CalArts: talent.
Today I’m feeling pretty rough, a bad cold has hit me and left me bed ridden. But my spirits were lifted a little when I got my acceptance letter from CalArts this morning. It’s a good day, and a proud day. All the stuff I went through to get this letter has been worth it. I’ll update this post later when I’m not feeling so rotten. I plan to outline what I did to prepare my portfolio, and everything that was involved with it, good and bad. But I just had to post today, to mark the occassion. What a day to get the good news. Sheesh!
Well…back to bed.
*UPDATE*
Okay so what did I have to do to get accepted? If you read this blog over the past year, it’s all pretty much here. But here’s a quick overview. Keep in mind I live in Vancouver, Canada.
Life drawing 4-5 days a week (minimum!) for 9 months. I went to Basic Inquiry for this.
The Zoo once a week with pens and a moleskin (Our zoo really sucks!)
I joined AnimatedBuzz Forums. This community’s sole purpose is to help you get in. Last year about 15 members got in. When class sizes are 35-40, that’s a pretty good average. This year’s count is up to 8 so far, myself included.
I made friends with current students. They helped me with my portfolio, and now I’ll already have friends going in.
It’s not always easy getting out to that many life drawing classes a week. I also worked full time, and I re-arranged my work/social life around my life drawing classes.
How bad do you want it? I can now say that after all the bad models, and the ones that didn’t show up. After the parking tickets, and speeding tickets. After all the rainy days trying to get into class without ruining all my stuff. After being towed and having to drag all my art supplies across the city to the impound lot. After consequently being late to work that day. After the hundreds I spent on supplies and gas…IT WAS ALL WORTH IT!
How bad do you want it?
If you want to check out my final portfolio click here. To see the portfolios of other accepted students, check out this thread over at Animated Buzz Forums.
Well I’m back from CalArts, and my head is still spinning. What an experience. Phone the school as much as you want, and read all the blogs in the world. It doesn’t even give you the tip of the iceberg. You have to GO THERE.
I spent so much time planning it all out to a “T”, but there was only so much I could plan, and only so many appointments I could make, which was frustrating. It seemed like a sort of unwillingness from the school to let me get the most of my one day there. But I realized after the first ten minutes on campus just how lax everything is. Just how layed back and, “meh”, life is there. I’d imagine the faculty allows such freedom to the students so they can unwind from the pressures of their films and how hard they push themselves with their actual work. Either way, it broke the ice for me right away, as I was a little nervous of what to expect when I first got there.
I was nervous because I was told to just walk around and ask people for feedback, which seemed kind of random and intrusive to a shy nerd from the great white north such as myself. To the contrary, EVERYONE said yes. EVERYONE was cool. I got so much feedback that I have no doubt in my mind what I have to do now. It’s just a matter of doing it well enough to get accepted.
The only bummer was that I forgot two of the caricatures that my friends John, and Sean drew of me (hilarious), and I had to leave early the beat rush hour and catch my flight. So I missed the guest speaker, which was my hero, Ben Ballistreri, of newfound, “Seaweed” fame. Oh well, if I get accepted, I’m sure I’ll see him again sometime.
I could go on forever about it, but I’m still digesting the whole experience. I don’t know what’s to come for me, but I know that my day at CalArts will play a big part in it. It has nothing to do with the school itself. It’s all about the people in it.
So here’s the final critique from my instructor. I got an A- on this, which I’m happy with.
So I’m not going to talk so much about the drawing as to address design concepts as we have not talked at all about them. In this I think that it is pretty good in that you have some things that tie it together. The figures are tied together with lines that are somewhat circular you may or may not have planned this but it is a fact. The eye will always be drawn to faces and the faces are close to one another so it puts the focal point in that area. One face is hidden so the focal point becomes obvious in the other. face. It is human nature that your eye will go there.
I’m pretty happy with my progress in this class. I still have one of two more critiques to post, as I just post them in the order the instructor marks them
I finally got some feedback on my self portrait. I was quite curious as to how my instructor was going critique this one because up until this point he had reference photos to fall back on. He could directly specify certain features that were off, or just drawn completely wrong because he knew exactly what we were duplicating. With this one, we drew them live, and therefore he didn’t have any reference. On top of this, unless we’ve uploaded a student profile picture, and he’s taken the time to check it out (highly doubtful), he has no real idea what I look like beyond my own representation here. So needless to say, I was pretty curious how he was going to tackle this one from a marking standpoint. I should have guess though, seeing as this is an anatomy class, and he’s an expert in anatomy, that he would focus solely on that. He can tell when something is off, or needs more definition, simply through his understanding of the forms. And this is what he did, commented on what looked of, and doesn’t make sense anatomically. This has got to be one of my favorite instructor critiques for this reason. It has taught me that we don’t need to rely on the reference if we have an in depth understanding of the forms. That is where I aspire to be someday. The face is very good here Dan. It has a bit of a Deco look to it. The hair needs work if only to fine tune the skull a bit. The neck needs some work as well. The face is the strong part. I would look at the upper lip to be darker if the light is coming from from above. Look for specifics of the forms of the features. For this I would recommend further reading into Stephen Pecks anatomy book that gives such a great education about the forms of each. The ear on yours is very good which is rare. Get the Peck book. You deserve the information as you have real ability here and should push it. X is the wide point of the head and the line from the back of the jaw is the wide part in general.The values are quite good. The lips are too pale and the upper is most likely deeper . You can make the lashes a soft tone I would look for a few highlights as they will give you an indication as to the tone of the flesh around it. The red and full part of the lips do not come all the way to the corners of the mouth. I would look for the area immediately above the eyebrows to be thicker. There is an area where a sweat band is worn that is thiner. There is a sort of bump at Z which is the frontal eminence
Created for my final experimental animation assignment. This was to be the scenery for a short featuring the lion puppet I created earlier. The base is made from balsa wood, the skeleton is aluminum wire, the body is Van Aiken clay, and the foliage is from a local craft store.
My final critiques are upcoming, and I think these are the ones I need the most. I clearly had trouble with the face and skull. I will have to practice lots in the summer. I have Vilppu DVDs, and I’ve also purchased a 3B Skull off of Ebay. I would suggest you do the same if you’re looking to improve. Here’s what my instructor had to say about the ugly face:
You have shrunken the skull as you have been focused on the face. The face will not look right as the skull does not back it up. Look at the areas HL. These are the highlights. In some areas you have made these the whole area. As around the nose and cheek. Look at the highlight and then look around it to see the value that is around the HL. Look at the side of the jaw at I. This area is the square form of the massetter. muscle. It is deeper in value than you have done. The shape is right but the value is off. No amount of fixing the form will change the fact that the value is off. You need to get the values better to have the form right. It is as if the form is turned in the wrong direction.
This week was the final week for Anatomy class. It was a chance for us to show off what we have learned this semester. I think I’ve learned a lot, but there’s so much room for improvement. There were no exercises this week, just one assignment, and a tough one at that. We had to take two different full figure poses and compose them into one drawing.
I chose to work on toned paper, as the module examples used it, and I still had some left over from previous drawing classes. I was pretty excited to use toned paper again, because I really liked the result I got the first time I used it.
There’s a few errors in anatomy, but for the most part I would say it’s pretty accurate. I don’t think I could have done this three months ago, which is a testament to what I learned in the last few months. If I had to guess I would say I spent about 3-4 hours on this. I did it over the course of the day, from early morning to about four o’clock in the afternoon, as I can’t sit still for too long. I could easily spend another 2 or 3 hours on this finishing it up, but I decided to stop here.
This was done on Canson Mi-Teintes Dark Grey #345 paper with black and white charcoal. It’s about 18×24. What an amazing class! I can’t wait to learn more about anatomy and improve on my drawings.
So here’s the much anticipated self-portrait. A much better effort than the previous portraits from this week, and a much more accurate representation of me than I expected to render. This will be the first of many self portraits to come.
It’s the classic 3/4 pose and 3 point lighting setup, so I’d like to experiment with different angles and lighting. I also want to loosen up a lot and have a little more fun with the next ones. This one was ridiculously intense, and I am soooo tired now.
This was done live, as in I setup a mirror, which is what the assignment called for. This was probably one of the most daunting aspects of the assignment. It took me a while to get my pencil moving, but once I realized it was just a picture like all the other assignments I was fine. But for anyone that hasn’t done a self-portrait before, they are HARD. So I thoroughly recommend giving it a try. I can’t wait to do my next one. But for now I need a rest. I did this one over the course of day, but I would guess it took me 3 hours. 18×24, Charcoal.
