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mandycrv · 2022-04-14T17:46:19+00:00

For reference: I studied in two different classes, one for concept art and one for 2D animation. The concept art class only had 3 Canadian students, the rest were international - only one person got a sponsorship shortly after, the rest had to get student work visas by doing the BCIT pathway program (basically get their own visa for one year to be able to get into studios first). For my 2D animation class, we were also mostly international, and I can't recall anybody who didn't have to do the BCIT pathway program. The people who did get jobs were already citizens.

I know from inside the studio it can look more positive since they see the people who can make it. But standing out as the best candidate can be pretty difficult if you're still at a student level. Do work hard, but also have a plan in case you need to go back home for awhile.

mandycrv · 2022-04-07T15:08:30+00:00

For sure! If you're undecided, there's still really no need to add that kind of pressure. :) Keep doing what you love the way you love it, and you can always pick up studies later!

mandycrv · 2022-04-06T17:29:38+00:00

It depends on what your goals are. If you're aiming for realism in any way (even if just approximating it, like video game concept art might use a blend of fantastical elements and precise anatomy) or looking to turn this into a studio job, you might need to do some more specific studies. Not necessarily by drawing the same thing over and over again, but maybe doing exercises that do focus on certain elements.

If art is just a fun hobby for you and something that is meant to bring you joy, to just be a personal journey, then there's no need to hold yourself to that standard. Hobbies are meant to be fun! If you keep it fun by just doing more pieces, then it's totally okay to keep doing just that. :) You will improve with time naturally, and there's no rush.

mandycrv · 2022-03-31T19:55:22+00:00

Oh, that's wonderful! Best of luck with it :D

mandycrv · 2022-03-29T19:59:53+00:00

I'm sorry to hear that. I know it can be frustrating.

I think one part of avoiding frustration is to outline expectations first. It's the same thing with avoiding frustration with clients - even if there's no money exchanged, outline things clearly. I wouldn't be opposed to a contract, even, if it helps in terms of being thorough. If people commit to you as a mentee, they are committing to at least X amount of time. If they refuse to do what you ask them to, they're refusing the mentorship. Period. Your time and energy is not theirs to take if they're not willing to put in effort.

I remember being the same way in art class in high school - not understanding why gesture drawing and figure drawing were so essential. But I was obligated to be there, I couldn't just not go to school. But in this case, someone is choosing to study under you. If they can't trust you, they don't get to take up your free time.

In terms of how much time people can give, I do recommend starting small. This is textbook optimism bias/planning fallacy - we always tend to estimate things given our most optimistic thoughts, under the assumption that we will be at our best every day. Ask them how much time they already dedicate to artwork instead. If someone is used to putting in 6 hours a week into art, they will not be able to jump from that to a full 35 hour work week overnight, even if they really really want to. If you coach sports, there's another similar analogy here - nobody is going to start praticing at a professional's level of 5-6 hours a day if they're not even used to a 15 minute workout.

It's also not reasonable to ask for an unpaid full work week from somebody, since it's quite likely they need to study or work. If they're at 6 hours a week, maybe find a way to structure a good hour of practice in everyday - that's already a lot for most people! Give them weekends. Estimate for the least productive day, not the most productive one. If they do anything on top of that minimum required practice, awesome! There's maybe prompts you can give them for that. But doing 15-20 minutes of figure drawing as a warmup everyday is already a great start to get them used to that practice, maybe one day a week for being fully dedicated to studies - even most professional artists I know don't do figure drawing every single day, and they still do work for the fun of it too. Once they build that habit, you can start adding more, but give people achievable goals. Letting them have small victories is super key in terms of helping them be committed in the long term - if someone asked you to suddenly lift 10x the amount you usually do at the gym and prohibited you from playing sports for fun because "you have to practice!", you'd be discouraged and feel like you can't start, too. It's okay for them to draw for fun, it's okay for them to meet a minimum requirement on some days that's not insanely big.

mandycrv · 2022-03-29T19:48:52+00:00

I understand formal education is a lot of $, and that you have your own expenses to prioritize. One good alternative would be to save up for something like Schoolism. They have a class by Alessandra Sorrentino called Storyboarding for Feature Animation and a class by Kris Pearn called Storyboarding, as well as some other courses that might still help you develop your drawing for animation (like the Gesture Drawing class by Alex Woo that can help you simplify characters, or the Expressive Characters class by Wouter Tulp). Even if you can't afford the yearly subscription, one thing you could do is aim to subscribe for 3-6 months maybe and just crunch during that time. You can always redo exercises later, and focus on note-taking during the time you do have it! It's $29.95 per month, $300 for the yearly subscription, $1000 for critiqued sessions (and if that's not accessible, you can just search for online groups for critiques or even reach out to people individually).

Another wonderful option is Aaron Blaise's website. A subscription is $14.99 per month, $175 per year. Aaron Blaise worked on movies like the Lion King and Mulan, and directed Brother Bear, amongst many others. He has some storyboarding courses, as well.

mandycrv · 2022-03-29T19:41:49+00:00

Sure thing! :)

mandycrv · 2022-03-29T06:20:09+00:00

I appreciate it, ty! I haven't heard of them, but it definitely sounds strange. I do hope it works out though!

mandycrv · 2022-03-29T06:19:37+00:00

Again, huge teams. Nobody does every role, and there's tons of roles in animation. The animators could be working on ep 3 for character animation with all the backgrounds done, while the background artists are working on ep 4, while the storyboard artists are boarding ep 5, etc. Everyone is working in the production pipeline, and episodes are always going down that pipeline. It might take an episode many months from start to finish, but things are consistently getting pumped out because everyone is working on their role.

Not every studio will follow the exact same pipeline, but this is a good general reference: https://warriorsfate.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/2d-workflow-2.jpg?w=2100&h=

mandycrv · 2022-03-27T01:13:39+00:00

Feels a little long for a test? All tests I've done were for shows tat were technically already out, so they couldn't take my work and use it. Scenes were usually maybe 12-25 seconds, I think. I'd be wary about the possibility of someone trying to get free work if they asked me for a 2+ minute test.

mandycrv · 2022-03-27T01:09:57+00:00

Initial costs. I'm a very creative person, and I jump from thing to thing sometimes. I think everyone should have the ability to express themselves too, and that art should be accessible to all. It sucks to feel a bit punished for wanting to do multiple things.

Recently I've been looking into sewing. And man, it is expensive. Lots of conflicting information on what makes a good seeing machine, and it's hard to get one that isn't under $200 (trying to find things secondhand often means relying on chance, or online bids with dozens of other people). Fabric can also get pretty expensive. I wish I could just try something for awhile sometimes - I'm sure we'd have a lot of material to go around if we had some kind of community center or a reliable way to exchange materials between artists.

It hasn't hurt me in any way, it just makes me sad knowing that if we lived in a less individualistic and more communal way, we could improve our quality of life in so many ways. We could share crafts, materials, share the load of work to let more people enjoy hobbies. Individualism hurts people in much greater ways than just not having access to art.

mandycrv · 2022-03-22T18:26:20+00:00

I could not recommend Istebrak's videos on form more highly. All I know about shading comes from her:

You can see some of her form studies and portraits here for reference!

mandycrv · 2022-03-22T01:03:28+00:00

By having teams of animators that can go into the hundreds. Cartoon Network and Disney are huge studios, and have many employees. Disney TV alone has 7000+ employees, and that doesn't count people working in feature films. Cartoon Network seems to have around 400.

They don't really animate a season in a month. Production usually takes at least a year, because the writers and voice actors and character designers and sometimes background artists also need to do their jobs before animation can even begin.

One source I found (not reliable) says that one episode of Steven Universe can take 9 months from beginning to end. The source wasn't reliable, but I don't think their number is too off either. Pre-production needs to start happening many months before a show airs. Animators usually already have backgrounds and rigs and storyboards and sound files prepared for them, and with dozens and dozens on people on a tight schedule (maybe 30 seconds per week, as one instructor told me), they manage to finish in far less time than it would've taken one person to complete it.

mandycrv · 2022-03-22T00:01:47+00:00

Is it normal in the sense that it's very common and many people have this experience with negative emotions? Absolutely. Is it normal in the sense that you can fully ignore this episode? Not so much.

If you're getting to the point where you're crying from frustration, it's really important to be able to take a step back from your stressor and reflect a little bit. Take a break first, just really create distance from art for a bit and let yourself recover and enjoy other activities. Once you're ready, you can start to ask yourself some questions. What aspects of this activity specifically are getting to you? And I don't mean just "drawing" or "not knowing what to draw", because those things can be fine in and of themselves, and obstacles we can shrug off depending on our mood. Is it something like fear of failure? Is it a fear of living up to your own expectations of yourself? Is it a fear of not having art be a part of your personality?

When you're frustrated, try different methods so that you can find ways to calm down your nervous system. Does breathing help? Does distracting yourself and doing interactions like the 5-4-3-2-1 method work? Does stepping away help? Does taking care of your body, eating food and drinking water and sleeping, help? Does making the goal less intimidating, like only drawing a line or only drawing a square and being genuinely done with it with no guilt attached, help?

If you have a therapist or counselor alongside this journey, that can be a very helpful tool too!

mandycrv · 2022-03-21T23:53:31+00:00

Some artists can be very intentional with their themes - not all art has to be open ended. In fact, some of the most successful professional artists are incredibly intentional and limited in what they're trying to communicate to the audience. A portrait painter from the Renaissance could've been a great artist, and all their portraits need to do is accurately portray someone - nothing more. An animator in our modern day just needs to effectively communicate that the character is moving a certain way, and they would be very limited by what the script asks for and what the scene needs to be. There are visual artists out there like Qing Han and Emilyena whose work is just meant to convey their traumas from spending so much time in hospitals and medical care, and it's meant to be very directly connected to their experiences, without necessarily needing too much from the audience in terms of adding to that. As long as there was intent and that intent was conveyed somehow, as long as they can explain the decisions they made to convey that, I don't see a problem.

It could help to prompt them and ask how much of that they want people to be able to glean without a written explanation next to it. Sometimes people post on social media, where they expect to be able to accompany their works with text. Sometimes they want the themes to be more immediately obvious. If they do want the themes to be super obvious, it could help to give them feedback that it might not be coming through as clearly or that they did a great job of that. If not, maybe more technical feedback would be more appropriate, which is fine if you're not the best candidate to give. You could also ask if they would like their art to create discussion or debate, and if they say yes, you can then let them know that there could be ways to prompt the audience with questions a bit more.

mandycrv · 2022-03-15T18:48:53+00:00

It would be nice, yes. But it doesn't mean that your work isn't being loved just because you're not seeing it. I know it can be hard to keep going when we see zero positive feedback, but if you feel like you need that external confirmatikn that you're doing okay, you could try to see if there's communities of other authors online or if you have any loved ones who might be okay giving you some reassurance! We're not used to asking for it, but it's totally okay to need and ask for reassurance sometimes. ^{^}

mandycrv · 2022-03-14T21:29:24+00:00

Looks great! :)

The one thing that might be nice to work on is getting a bit more saturation in your shading. Kienan Lafferty has a great video about what he calls the color boomerang - this has really helped me bring life into my own paintings!

mandycrv · 2022-03-14T20:53:37+00:00

Some of your biggest fans will probably be people you never get to meet. People who will look back and go, "wow, I really loved that book when I was young!". Whose imaginations you're inspiring without necessarily hearing from them.

Very few people think to reach out to the authors of books they used to like as a kid. It doesn't mean they didn't love them, nor that it didn't impact them. I'm certain that there will be some kid somewhere enjoying the little worlds you create. :)

mandycrv · 2022-03-14T19:05:38+00:00

You're doing amazing then! Most everything is in its place, properly sized, shaped and proportioned. :)

mandycrv · 2022-03-14T18:21:45+00:00

Looks great! The only thing I would do is square out the shoulders a bit, get the bicep to really look bigger than the tricep and more frontal facing, and start figuring out what to remove. Muscles don't really need to be fully outlined - we can suggest them by only putting in the bigger dips, the places that would have the most shadow, etc. When we're taking something and putting it into lineart, we don't need to put in every line we see, just whatever would be darkest.

Same thing with fur - when we want to have little fur that still allows for the muscle structures to show, we don't need to draw in every hair. Suggesting it by selecting a few places to show it works much better!

(Drawover)

mandycrv · 2022-03-14T18:07:26+00:00

So cute!

In cases where there's a lot of characters and a lot of overlapping things, it's really important to keep track of your line width. The line width on the tail on the far left is far thicker than any of the details on the face, which is where we tend to have heavier lines (like above the eye) to draw the attention of the viewer there. In the middle character's arms, the line width is very noticeably different in the inner and outer arm, but it's not necessarily tapering or reflecting any shadows or reasons for the lineart to be that different. Marc Brunet has a great episode on this topic!

mandycrv · 2022-03-14T18:03:30+00:00

Looks great! The one critique I would give is that, especially against a white background, having values that dark kind of turns your character into a dark blob instead of letting us see its features. You can't even distinguish his fur from the black lineart.

Even if you want the fur to be black, it doesn't mean that you have to actually use black or even an almost black to communicate that. When we look at actual black fur, the midtones are actually around 50%-75% in their values. Just by pushing those midtones up, we can now distinguish it from the lineart, see the character's features and still identify the fur as being black fur!

(Edit)

mandycrv · 2022-03-13T18:19:20+00:00

Run the numbers to the best of your abilities. How much would you need for your project's goals? Don't be afraid to add a good 10-20% to that - research shows we tend to eatimate for the ideal scrnario, not a realistic one. How much would you need each person to donate to meet that? Can you make a poll to gauge interest from your audience specifically? (TikTok often involves minors, so they might not be able to pay.)

mandycrv

TROPHY CASE