Daniel 1

This week, I was reminded of the biblical Daniel, who had refused Nebuchadnezzar's royal food and wine and asked "Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see."

The Max the Mutt weblog apologizes "I hadn’t realized that soda pop had snuck into our vending machine! I’ve asked that it be replaced with water and juice".

We are so lucky to have this school which really cares about our health, and you know what, I'm not the only one, the convenience store around the corner is happy too!

And then, there was animation...

It all started with a bouncing ball. It is simple animation exercise which teaches you about basic animation principles like 'squash and stretch'. Not too exciting, neither were other exercises like falling paper, waving line, rollercoaster, pendulum clock, until we did a profile walk.

A profile walk cycle is one of the more advanced beginner exercises, where things learned in the earlier exercises are tied together. I choose to animate a simple 'Chaplinesque' character in a nice and speedy walk, with a small prefix, just for fun.

The final exercise of this term was a flour sack exercise, which frees you from the burden of keeping a more or less anatomical character alive. Your character is a flour sack, where the four corners play the role of hands and feet, which is simple enough to draw, allowing you to go wild on acting. We were to animate a jump, but I find inspiration for some more walking and, finally, a real Fosbury Flop.

Driving my horses at once

For a year and a half we have been studying the basic concepts of life drawing, i.e gestures, contours, modelling and masses, emphasizing the underlying process, without much attention for the product. One of our directors tends to explain that 'the pregnancy is more important than the child', and although I'm not totally happy with the comparison, the message is clear.

It is only in our second year that we are learning how to use these tools, integrating these into a process that is ignited through gesture, channelling this energy into more and more concrete masses, polished with delicate outlines. We have got the chisels, hammers, sandpaper and a nice piece of wood: let's make something beautiful!

Although a fine and sharp chisel is essential for a skilful carving, it is no guarantee. Yes, I do have a basic understanding of gestures and masses and contours, but the use of these tools still puzzles me: all too often the creative impulse of the gesture gets lost in my attempts to get things Right, or the final result still consists of shapeless energy. This requires a lot more training.

My main achievement of last term is a small breakthrough in my gestures. All of a sudden, I noticed how I made a lot of observations in my head, without ever entrusting them to the paper, which meant they all too often were lost forever. Realizing this allowed me to be more intuitive, loosening up, which really shows in my work.

Background information

The end of the term is near, it is time to wrap up. One of my favourite classes was 'Background Painting', and it makes me a little melancholic that this is already the last painting course of my program. Maybe I'll grab the opportunity to learn more about painting at the Academy of Realist Art, but for an animator, drawing is much more important, so for now, I'm done.

Background painting consists mainly of painting someone else's layout according to someone else's colour key, so although it requires true craftsmanship, I did not find it really exciting. My favourite piece was based on my own layout, but I left it at school for the end-of-year show. So, all I can show here are some pieces that did not make it into the expo. Enjoy!

Royal Winter Fairy Tales

Max the Mutt paid an annual visit to the Royal Winter Fair. I discovered too late that the official name is Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, which spoiled part of the fun. It is an exhibition of live stock and everything associated, and, yes, that is sheep and horses and cows and, most exotic, a lama and, no, I don't think it was the dalai variety.

What made my day was the fact that freshly shaven sheep were protected against the cold by a funny one-size-fits-all hooded suit, with big holes for eyes, ears and nose. The hood made them look like the good old-fashioned executioner, which gave them an evil look and feel. These creepy creature really looked like sheep in wolfskin...

9999999999 luftballons

It must have happened in Primary 1. We learnt to write from a book suspiciously titled 'First clear, then fast'. For each of the letters of the alphabet and each digit, we were first to trace them, then we had to complete a dashed version and, finally, we had to write them completely, neatly between four lines in our notebook, following the correct order of lines the mistress had shown us. I hated it.

I will never forget the day we learned to write the digit '9' and the mistress demonstrated a series of '9's, each starting inside the top curl, ending at the tail. In a flash of genius, I spotted the flaw in her performance, and immediately devised an optimization: I jotted down a fast series of curls, adding the tails in a second sweep. Needless to say, I was done before my classmates had even started, and I spent the rest of the class beaming with pride.

It did not take too long for the mistress to notice my exceptional skills, and she told me to come and stand in front of the classroom, as an example: "Look everybody at what Izak has done! He did not write 9's as everybody else, no, he has been drawing balloons!" And I promised myself to never ever develop a clear handwriting. Fifteen years later I went to University to study Computer Science.

And now I am a Second Year Art Student. Whereas the First Year at Max the Mutt is very much process oriented, teaching the tools of the trade, the Second Year is more and more product oriented, producing decent stuff. One of the things that will one day make me break my own fingers in agony, is a phenomenon called 'line quality': clean and smooth lines, that express the nature of whatever they represent. It is very much tied to motor skills, which is one of the things that develops only slowly once you have reached my age. This is not going to be an easy year.

On the other hand, I feel that my teachers will make me push harder, lifting my art to new levels, chasing me out of my comfort zone (that's where the pillows are). My Life Drawing teacher has more or less forbidden me to use the hatching style I came to admire, forcing me back to basics. And I am doing as I am told, curious as I am where this will lead me.

As a 'Farewell to Hatching' I visited The Keyhole Sessions Girls.Grease.Rope event during Toronto's Nuit Blanche. Two chicks on a motor cycle lured the crowds that came in to watch and draw six adorable models posing in a girl's Fight Club scene. I joined from 22:00 till 0:30 to jot down some quick group poses.

On top of this, I paid a visit to Dr. Sketchy's for a night of burlesque life drawing.


And for now, back to work!

Pigeons in retrospect

The pigeons have grown up and left the nest. Time to look back...