Draws with Claws

When I was in college there was this ongoing competitive mindset from the teachers /students that: “If you’re not drawing all night / getting 1 - 2 hours of sleep, you’re going to fall behind.” If you’re an artist you’ve probably met this kind of thinking… I’ve heard it from so many pros / tutorials.

One of my professors said that line all the time. I loved this dude. he worked at Disney on many of my favorite movies, and my young self became absorbed in this mindset. About 3 years into my degree that professor had a stroke, and when he went to the doctor they said he actually previously had something like 10+ strokes without even knowing, brought on by stress, and that he needed to slow down. 

Since then I’ve heard tons of other accounts of sickness and divorce brought on from addiction to work.

A few years later I was listening to an Animation podcast interviewing Glen Keane. He brought up that there were other animators who would live and breathe their work, never going home, barely sleeping, etc. 

What shocked me was that Glen Keane said something like “I ignored this idea, and decided to go home every night to spend time with my family, because I could learn just as much from my life experiences with them.” 

Anyway I just wanted to take a second after hearing a statement like this again recently and let any young artists out there know that:

Hi!

I build a small rough base in SketchUp and added in models from other files to roughly populate the scene (TV, Lights, chairs, etc) played around with the ‘Time of Day’ to get a sense of how I wanted the light. The initial pass looked like this before going back and adding a couch. The exported this as a PNG and dropped it on a Photoshop file and started blocking in. Since most of the major shapes were already in place, it didnt take too long.

I did deviated from the SketchUp base on some parts in the final image, I didnt want it to be an exact copy, I just needed a reference point, and SketchUp tends to be really good about that.

And like I’m like. Oh great, a horse themed gender reveal party.

complete with like … just truly excessive foods and of course, themed cocktails

and this sign which like… the fragility of like *not* italicizing the word ‘colt’. Like imagine being this weird abt gender

with like, a bucket that eventually ‘revealed’ the gender

But like… the picture that really just completely undid me, for this party which surely was more money than many weddings -

And my all-time favorite: