So You Think You Can Draw | Jill Halliday
There’s always one. That kid in class who stands out as the one who can draw. Right from kindergarten, the teacher thought their scribbles stood out as being somehow deep, and havd been executed with purpose, with an understanding of depth of field, composition, and Chiaroscuro. Their stick figure family’s anatomy was far more accurate than the other kids’ stick figures in the class. The stick mom’s alarmingly large head was explained away by the adults as ’internationally symbolic of her status in the family dynamic’, and isn’t it remarkable how a child so young would even understand symbolism, and, look… has forward thinkingly included seven random ‘adopted‘ children, adults and eleven stick dogs. But no cats. Three of the adopted stick kids were allergic to cats.
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The first thing I learned in drawing class on the first day of college was that I didn’t know how to draw. I was suddenly in a magical land where all of the other students were there for the same reason as me. Many of them had already been to university, or taken a year or more off to travel, or work. There was even one guy in my class who was six foot six, and 26 years old! I mean, he was an actual man! With a big deep voice and everything!
The bad news was that I most certainly did not know how to draw. The good news was, I was finally at the beginning of my journey to learn how.
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The other good news was that most of the others didn’t know how to draw either. And NONE of us knew how to animate!
Except for Andy. (I’ll call him Andy, because that was his name.) Andy could draw anything.
I had the incredible privilege of working beside Andy at Sheridan. He was a lovely guy. Charming and funny. Humble, but with no false modesty.
One of our assignments in the three years there was to choose and design an object, then animate it rotating in place, 360°, you know, like Linda Blair’s head in ‘The Exorcist’.
This is what Andy chose and did. A Tall Ship on a raging Sea. Using no reference, he sat down and just got to it. His technical skills were spot on. Perfect. Characters. Brilliant. He was a joy to watch work, and welcomed an audience as he drew, and flipped the layers of animation paper that seemed like liquid as he sat there, creating his tall ship, animating it rising, listing, dropping and violently swirling around on the giant, raging sea that splashed, crashed and SMASHED against it, oh ya, and he added Pirates swinging from rigging, and some running for cover, and others leaping overboard to certain death! Let’s remember here! This is Old School, pencil on paper, working five sheets at a time, 12-24 drawings per second of film! The Instructors would join the rest of us just to watch Andy draw. He was a gift to the industry.
I reluctantly returned my gaze to my own work which, remember Dear Reader, was the same assignment as Andy’s. He had chosen to design a tall ship, on a raging sea, with a crew of Pirates, thrusting everything into every axis and angle when the assignment was a simple rotation of a single object.
I rotated a marshmallow. No I didn’t.
I did a human skull. Back then (1982), you just signed it out, like a library book. Yep. A REAL HUMAN SKULL, from the Life Drawing studio, I think. Walked home with it in my backpack. I had it in my room for two nights while I was using it as my reference for the rotation assignment. Does that seem weird to anybody? That you can just ‘sign out’ a head?
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The first thing I learned on the first day at Crawley Films was that I still didn’t know how to draw. I was suddenly in a magical land where all of the other newly hired ‘Raccoons’ Crew were there for the same reason as me. Many of them had been in my class at Sheridan, or had graduated a year or more before or after me! There was even one guy there who was six foot six, and almost 30 years old! I mean, he was an actual man! With a big deep voice and everything!
The bad news was that I was, once again, about to learn that I, more than ever, did not know how to draw. The good news was, I was finally about to embark on the beginning of my journey to learn how. For the rest of my days.
Bring it.