Onward, but Upward?

zoo sketch, 2018 

zoo sketches, 2019

It's fall!

Well, from a technical-calendar point of view. We're still hitting highs in the 90s here in Nashville. (Global warming? Curse of a summer witch? Regardless, it still sucks). I'm ready for fall to arrive this year, and there have been a couple days when the wind hit the hills just right, and autumn began to sing in the air... But those days have sadly been all too few for a late September. I'm ready for the seasons to change, and I'm hoping to summon up some holiday spirit this year. As faithful Roost-ers may know, last year I couldn't really catch any holiday excitement until Easter. I even didn't have a costume ready for Halloween (one of my recurring childhood nightmares, believe it or not). I expect things may be different this year. I've already started to dip into my fall playlist and listen to old-timey tunes. Cause for me, fall is a time for old things. Old farmhouses draped in decaying leaves. Dusty antiques of a nostalgic era. Ragtime and folk music.

Fall also feels like a good time to read (perhaps old books) and reconsider my modern assumptions about the world, one of which I wanted to talk about today. The idea of the onward and upward, specifically when it comes to practicing art or honing any type of craft. That the two are invariably linked. (Disclaimer: most of what I'm about to say is inspired by and an artsy paraphrase of this Joshua Gibbs article. Didn't want you to get any ideas that I'm smarter than I actually am.)

I think there's always this expectation that as long as you practice, things will get better. In vague metaphorical terms - If you are going onward, then you are inherently going upward too. And while this may be true in the extremely long term, on a daily, weekly, or even yearly basis it doesn't seem so convincing. Any of us who make something (art, homes, artisan cat food) know the feeling. No matter how much you practice, sometimes nothing (or everything) comes out right. Often this is accompanied by other events. You get art block. Your dog dies. You fall in love. You watch 24 straight hours of Ghibli movies. All of these will directly affect your art, yet none of them are practice-related. What gives? You have may already guessed, dear reader, the trick: art doesn't just flow from skill, but also inspiration, joy, loss, wisdom, luck - in other words, from life. To quote Gibbs more directly here, "If [art] has anything to do with life, the quality of an [artist's] work will be a bit uneven - just like life itself is uneven."

If you look an artist's entire body of work, you're not going to see a steady rise, where each piece is better than the last. Rather, the line on the Graph of Goodness is going to be all over the place - sporadic masterpieces, periods of drought, times of learning and breakthroughs. This pattern can be found in other areas of life - I know this process has been particularly true in my faith. Despite my efforts, my relationship with God goes through periods of stagnation, passion, instruction, growth, and stagnation again. The amount of Scripture reading, church visiting, and other disciplines do not always have a direct correlation to the quality of the finished work, my relationship with God. Here's an example from the art zone: each school year I do an illustration of me and our school mascot, a bison. But I haven't made one for this year. To be honest, the real reason why I haven't is that I don't know how to top last year's drawing. I'm worried that this year's will not be much better (or perhaps worse!) than the one I did last year. Yet I have a desire to show everyone that I'm making significant progress. Cause if I don't know how to draw a better bison after a whole year of schooling, what am I doing with my life??

Enough about me. Let's look at the example of Brad Bird. He starts incredibly strong with The Iron Giant (1999), following that up with The Incredibles (2004), which may just be the most perfect animated film ever made.  Ratatouille (2007) is good, but not Incredibles level, and I don't know much about Ghost Protocol (2011).  But Tomorrowland (2015) was a forgettable flop and Incredibles 2 (2018) an underwhelming sequel. Brad Bird, an animation wizard, still makes mistakes, even later in his career.

The point is that anything that involves some level of artistry is going to involve your life in some way. So unless your life is quickly and methodically progressing towards perfection, don't expect your art to either. Sometimes, life and art just suck. And in this fallen world, that's natural. I think that's one of the most important things for me to remember. When you see someone doing KILLER work - the kind of stuff that hits you with a double-punch of inspiration and jealousy (Saira Vargas for me recently) - that is unnatural (or perhaps super-natural). The paint and the artist's hand didn't naturally want to do that, but through mastery of nature, the artist has made it so. Although Instagram does a good job of hiding this, that art was born of struggle, perhaps years of accumulated struggle. Babies can't draw well, or make coffee well, or love well, because they haven't fought for it yet. It's a process that takes time and heartache - the combination of dutiful practice, and the experience of life. And plenty of mistakes and bad drawings. 

One of my biggest fears is that I'll slip backwards and get worse at art. But the important thing to remember is that me sucking at art is natural. My hand wants to make awful, jagged lines. My brain wants to draw everything all stiff and out of perspective. Therefore, it's a supernatural feat of will to make something truly beautiful. The real danger creeps in when you think you are above error - a straight A artist. There's a saying in the art community that your hand has 1,000 or 10,000 or so bad drawings in it that you got to get out. Which implies that you'll reach a point where the bad drawings stop. When every drawing will be golden. But as Rebecca Sugar says in this panel, it's always a struggle. No matter how much you draw, those bad drawings are never truly over. It's like running - if you're not having trouble, you're probably walking. Wow. Doesn't that just make you want to be an artist?! 

No really - Isn't that great? We're not expected to be perfect, and our art shouldn't be either. All we can do is show up every day, and try to grow in righteousness and skill. It's the showing up that's important - the practice in the midst of the hard times, independent of the final results. I think we can be more proud of a decent drawing born on a bad day than a fantastic drawing created on a great one. Cause although Instagram and studio recruiters will judge them equally, we know that it took buckets more motivation to make the former. And it's the building of good habits, of good person-age, that will likely serve us better in the days to come.

Can I get an amen, bloggerfolk?

Hope this post finds you well, wherever in life you may be. Let me know what's up in the comments.
-dh

The Right Place: A Weekend at Lightbox

Hi.

I’m back. Both here at the Roost, and home in Nashville. A lot has happened since my last post, but I’m not even sure I have time to recount that month – this past week has been crazy enough (crazy good, don’t worry). I’ve just come back from a lovely visit to Lightbox Expo, and I feel as though I’ve been hit with life experience whiplash. In short, it was a bit surreal to wake up in Central Time, see campus outside my window, and go eat in a cafeteria. My whole Lightbox trip felt very much like the journeys in The Lord of the Rings and The Wind in the Willows – a needed escape from the familiar and routine, which now at the end, are the things you’re most excited to return to. That’s the hobbit part of me, I guess. Yet as ready as I was to come back home and see familiar faces, the actual experience of it has taken some getting used to. I feel like Rat in The Wind in the Willows after his enchantment by the Sea Rat – dazed, tired, a little sad, and in dire need of a poetry-filled cure. And since I don’t write much poetry, I’m back here at the Roost.

However, this has also been a rather challenging blog post to write: I’ve been sitting on it for a day or so, trying to come up with funny quips or stellar observations - you know, typical fare here on the Roost ;) But I just don’t really know where to begin or what to say. I think it’s because I’ve had so many thoughts and experiences that they’ve all gotten tangled up in my mind - some kind of knotted yarn ball of animation bewilderment and fanboyish wonder. But if I’m not careful, that ball is going to roll away down a forgotten memory lane. I’m going to try to untangle some of it here, and capture some of what I saw and learned. This trip was too important to forget. (Also I need to ditch this yarn metaphor.)

FIRSTLY: There were a lot of unknowns in this trip. I initially didn’t know if our animation department would choose to go to CTN or Lightbox. This was Lightbox’s first year of existence too, so no one knew what it would actually be like. Even once Professor Tom did decide on Lightbox, we didn’t know where we would stay, if the trip would wreck my schedule by being a class credit, or exactly how much it would cost. While I don’t particularly like any amount of unknowns, you can’t dispute that they’re a perquisite for a good adventure. And as reluctant as I am to admit it, the unknown is where it’s often the easiest to find God. And good gracious was He there on this trip. (Buckle up – I already know this is going to be a long post).

Perhaps His first act of grace was keeping me healthy and safe during the weeks prior to the trip. You guys have no idea how much I worried about getting sick and being unable to go! I think I made some kind of idol out of this experience. But despite the sleep lost due to my excitement and anxious prepwork for the trip, I emerged ready to go Wednesday morning at 5:30am. We had a very early flight.

Landing in the Burbank airport was an especially memorable moment for me. Since this would be my first time in California, I didn’t quite know what to expect. But when I arrived it felt like I recognized it somewhat – probably due to my study of Louie Zong’s art. But what a different world from Tennessee & NC! I was thankful for the hills that surrounded the city – without rain or seasons, at least I would have some mountains to look upon. They actually were quite beautiful at sunset, too. LA also had more plants than I expected – I guess my East Coast brain assumed it was some kind of wasteland with a few animators huddling in a cave – and was thankful to find that there was still a lot of life. Talking about the weather became a familiar happening during the trip, which was perhaps fitting, since it was so different to me. Or perhaps it was because we were all awkward artists and didn’t feel like talking about photoshop brushes anymore.

Wednesday was full of joyful occurrences. I love happy reunions, and it had been a good while since I had seen my friends Naomi and Clay, who had recently moved to the area. They picked our group up from the airport and joined us for the rest of the trip. (MAJOR SHOUTOUT to them, if they’re reading, for driving us around and using up their very expensive LA gasoline). Following this reuniting, we all went straight to Disney. The Disney. The Big Dog. The Biggest Mouse. The Mouse House. Our giddiness of having just arrived in California was only amplified by the fact that we were basically standing on animation holy ground. I think this picture captures my friends and I in one of the happiest moments of the trip – grateful to be standing there, not yet worn down by the business of the expo.

When we walked inside we just happened to run into Mark Henn, Tom’s mentor (just one of many providential circumstances that were a common feature of this trip). He then took us on a pre-tour tour, thwarting the well-meaning plans of our guide, who had to find us when our tour actually began 30 minutes later. Having already signed our NDAs, Mark led us deeper into the studio where we watched the employees line up for an afternoon snack. I saw two people I thought were Paul Briggs and was pretty at least one of them was him. It was a little bit of a revelation to learn that the people at Disney were just real people, doing their job (and getting free ice cream). I had always imagined them as animation demigods, perhaps slightly glowing with talent, footsteps sizzling with drawing ability. But they were just human. The studio had been recently renovated and looked very fresh. However, the renovation had done some “spring cleaning” when it came to Disney’s hand-drawn features. Most of the art was all from Disney’s recent decade of CG films – you actually had to go to the bottom floor to find art displays from the older features. Although I love Zootopia, I missed the Bambi and the Lion King. Call me a sentimentalist, I guess.

Throughout the trip, Tom did a great job of setting up meals with animation pros – I got to dine with Bobby Chiu (creator of Lightbox; no idea how he had the time or sanity to meet us), Mark Henn, Laura Price, and Pernille Orum (which I mostly missed due to waiting in line for an expo badge). What an honor!

quick meeting with armand serrano

not actually from my instagram - credit: robert hughes

And on Friday, the Expo began.

A lot’s been said about the expo online already – and I agree with most of it. It was well organized, well executed, and well attended. I think the main highlight was that unlike other cons, this one was filled with not just fans, but fan-creators. There was a mutual fan-ship – one where an artist would say “I love your work!” to which the other artist would likely reply “I love your work too!” Even as a small artist (both in stature and online following) I was surprised by how many of these interactions I had. And to top it off everyone was very friendly.

For me, the expo was mostly about meeting my heroes – the reason why I had gone was mainly due to the deluge of “I’m coming to Lightbox” posts I had seen from nearly all of my inspirations. So I didn’t end up going to many panels (just 2) or demos (just 1), because those took me away from the show floor where most of the people were. Especially as a shy person, I wanted to give myself every opportunity to meet as many people as possible (which usually meant skipping lunch. I have since resumed luncheon-ing). Having just come from my second Heroes Con, I felt more ready to engage and not let this opportunity pass me by. So during the hours of the con, I went on a whirlwind tour of the artist tables I had marked on my must-see list (yes, I made a list - analytical left-brain Daniel wanted to come to Lightbox too). I also got to meet a few artists I knew on Instagram and had talked to before the expo: notably Luis Huerta and Karla Circe. Luis is a friend from the Jellybots community, and Karla is a fellow Bluey fan. I also got to meet Tristian Yuvienco (@trisketched), a pleasant surprise, since I didn't expect to be able to see him at the expo. And I got to (re)meet Erika Schnellert and Nicholas Kole too – and they remembered my name!?

It was wild and amazing to be in such great company for the weekend.

Lightbox was secondly about getting portfolio reviews. And while I wasn’t able to get anyone to look at my story portfolio (which was not as easy to flip through), I did get some constructive advice on my visual development portfolio. The first review I received was more cutting and negative, and while I agreed with the criticism, it made me very hesitant to show the portfolio to more people. But the next day I received a fairly positive review (some pieces were basically “90% industry level”). It was like filling a bucket up with water, realizing it has dozens of holes, but then hearing someone say “but it still holds water!” Biggest note: my recent pieces are my best ones. That may seem obvious, but what I’ve been doing recently is prop design. And a tiny, albeit cool, sword on a page wouldn’t seem to have the WOW factor that a full environment painting would. But to my surprise, I found that in both positive and negative reviews, it was the props that garnered the most praise. And they were all at the back of my portfolio. I’ve done some reshuffling since.

Nick drawing dragons on the big screen

I went to two panels – the first was Nicholas Kole’s Spyro talk. It was filled with laughter, a defense of furries, and excellent advice. The most immediately applicable tidbit was this common mistake in an artist’s mindset:

Good/positive feedback = well-meaning, but insincere lies

Harsh/negative/constructive feedback = the real stuff

I found myself thinking back on this a ton after my portfolio reviews, and it allowed me to see the truth in my good review rather than dwelling too much on my negative one. This panel was Nick his element, and likely had the best powerpoint of any of the panels at the expo. And when the lights came up after the talk I saw that it was basically the Nick fanclub/Jellybots patreon crew in attendance! So it was great to meet those guys that I had previously only known online.

On Saturday I went to the SCOOB! panel and got to meet Sara (@servalsketch) while doing so! We had a nice chat in line and got to be excited about Scoobert together :) We also sat on the front row while the panel members threw confetti and scooby snacks at us (it was a wild panel at times). The guy who gave the talk is in this visdev portfolio advice video that I have watched a lot, so seeing him in real life and not talking about “family friendly entertainment” was a little surreal.

But not everything was sunshine and well-drawn roses. RUH ROH you say – Complaining zone. Wasn’t going to Lightbox enough for you, Daniel? BE GRATEFUL, MY MAN. And to that I say heck yes, I will. It was most definitely a great experience and I have few, if any regrets. But all the other Lightbox posts I’ve read have been major gush-fests of Lightbox love and I don’t want your FOMO to get so bad that you invent a time machine or something and steal my spot in a panel line. I’m moreso doing this to have something to compare future Boxes with and to help Bobby Chiu make future events even better (if for some reason he is reading this). I’ll make it quick: Bullet Point Round!

• Unless a (well known) artist had a table, it was difficult to meet them. There were several people I wanted to meet but couldn’t cause there wasn’t any great way to approach them. It made the guest list a little deceptive, since anyone famous was listed (not just the tablers).
• Signs outside showed badge pickup times for exhibitors, not general public. Although this did lead to a nice conversation with a talented artist, that conversation happened during an hour long wait in line and I missed breakfast :(
• Saturday was packed! Most tables had a crowd and it was difficult to navigate down the aisles. I missed the relaxed, time-to-talk, space-to-walk attitude of Friday and Sunday. Also we had to leave early on Sunday to get back to class on Monday :( (not Bobby's fault)

And after every day I was totally drained! Sustained 1-on-1 social engagement with people I don’t really know yet really want to impress took a lot out of me each day. And I never fully got over my jet lag, which didn’t help. There was one night when I hung out with Clay and Naomi and I’m pretty sure that I could have fallen asleep instantly at any time if I stopped thinking about being awake. But then I would also wake up early (also due to jet lag)! And during that mini insomnia I animated this for a Lighbox dance-off contest, presented to you here in all it’s screamy glory:

It made it on screen at the event, and fellow Lipscomb friend Trea Bailey actually took home a prize!

Throughout the whole trip I felt this weird push and pull relationship with LA and the future I imagine myself having there. There were times when living in LA seemed so exciting, the prospect of a job so close, and the community of animation artists so inviting. But there would be other times when the thought of navigating traffic, moving to a totally new place, and working in darkened offices filled me with dread. I think I came away from the experience really wanting to work in LA, but not really wanting to live there. Hopefully I’ll be able to reconcile this paradox if God helps me get out to Burbank and make some cartoons.

But I do feel like LA is just “the right place” – where it’s only a matter of waiting before the right time comes along. I know Lightbox is an exaggerated example, but it just seemed so easy to make connections and meet people in what could only be described as a providential kind of coincidence. There was so much I couldn’t plan or anticipate about this trip. But God was so faithful in putting me near the right people to make it worthwhile.  I wonder if living in LA would be similar. Lightbox was definitely the right place for me to be this past weekend – and I’m glad God provided so many right times.

Hope you find your place, but thanks for choosing to be here, at the Roost, right now.

-dh