Mermaids and PIXAR

I drew this image with a photo reference of a girl doing aerial arts, and decided to make her a mermaid.

Sometimes I feel like I try too hard to draw something picture-perfect from its reference, that the imagination doesn't get its fair time to shine.  I think that with any kind of drawing - if you do want to become an artist - you always need to step back from perfection a little bit and just play around with the pen on paper.  I'm getting a lot of cool images that way, so it's really exciting.

Tonight, I was lucky enough to meet Aarom Hartline, one of the animators at PIXAR, as he was doing a talk at Columbia College.  He had the most impressive example to what it was like to grow up without that privileged background or support in art, just wanting to do it because he knew it was what he loved to do.  He started working at small game design companies as a character designer, while raising a daughter and going to night school for computer animation to get a grip on that booming business.  It was his own perseverance and help from his fellow classmates that kept him in the job market, and it took him thirteen years of rejection before he'd get to set foot inside the Pixar studios.

It's made me nostalgic about the ideas I had about becoming an animator, way back in late 2008.  Wow, has it really been 4 years!?  Did I give up too easily, or did I just not want it enough?  I don't know... I find myself going through class schedules for animation and drawing courses at local colleges, wondering what it'd be like to actually say I have a demo reel with work.  I feel like I'm limiting myself for no reason.

It would be nice to put myself out there, again.