Fear, Laziness and Life Drawing

So....some blog inactivity going on here, eh? I don't have a good excuse, but I did realize tonight that I was getting into a nasty habit of making things with the full intention of displaying them publicly. This makes me not enjoy making things. I have found that I need to give myself the option to not show my work to anyone in order to really enjoy making it "for myself."

I was thinking about the tortoise and the hare. "Slow and steady wins the race," right? I can't remember if it was ever explained to me why the hare was running in the first place--was he just showing off? If so, why do people show off? It's because they're scared of being assessed as crappy, I think. The traditional moral of the tortoise and the hare is totally unsatisfactory; I think the real lesson is that you gotta just do your own thing; stop showing off and stop worrying about being slow or dull. At least for me it is.

I started taking life drawing classes with Karl Gnass this past Friday at the American Animation Institute in Hollywood (actually just a bunch of classes they offer at the Animation Guild). He's definitely the fanciest quick-sketch life-drawing dude I've ever seen. It's a seven hour class, so if nothing else, I'll have a bunch of life drawings to post throughout the summer. I'm also taking classes at Santa Monica College, which is a community college that, oddly, has a well-funded "Entertainment Technology" program. I'm taking Color Theory and Perspective, both taught by amazing teachers. The Perspective teacher also teaches the same class at CalArts, and he draws killer camera angles with a dry-erase marker on a whiteboard throughout the four-hour class. Here's the first assignment from my color class (or part of it, at least): make a three-character lineup and color them "cool." Part "B" is "warm," naturally. To come.