Hey everyone - or maybe just the one person who reads this blog, I dunno.
I've been on a huge hiatus this past month and a half, mainly due to my plans drastically changing for next year, and me emotionally trying to deal with it.
As it turns out, I won't be moving out to California to finish my MFA next year.
Furthermore, I decided to drop the MFA altogether, after realizing that my art skills were not up to par with what the animation industry is looking for. This was really difficult for me to admit, since I had been gambling on the idea that I could work as an artist for a major animation studio for almost four years now. I applied for internships, talked to many people this entire time... but overall, I wasn't completely satisfied with everything I was learning. I felt like an amateur who didn't really understand how to think like a working artist, much less know the tools of the trade.
Plus it doesn't help to know that many graphic artists are hired (outsourced) overseas, making the availability of good entry level jobs in animation studios hard to come by. I couldn't afford to spend more time and money on a big gamble like that, especially since this is supposed to be the foundation to my career.
So yeah... I guess you can say I've had a lot of thinking to do.
I'm still holding onto my artistic habits, working on my self a little bit more to figure out what it is that I want for next year. I'll be sticking around Chicago, which is making me excited about the possibility of living in the city for the first time. =)
I have some interviews lined up. Things look good.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Practicing with the Bamboo
Things are looking up.My sister got me a Bamboo tablet for my birthday, and I just started to play around with it last night. The plan was to go to bed by 12am, but I instead kept doodling on Wacom Doodler until 2am. Of course, Doodler is not Photoshop, but there's something beautiful that comes from limitations. If anything, it's making me more comfortable with color!
I can also sketch with it, too!
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
getting to the Heart of the matter
Whenever I realize I have to commit to something, my first natural tendency is to overcommit to other smaller things. Things that I wouldn't really enjoy doing on a regular, genuine basis, but nevertheless keep me from pouring my heart into something I care about.
This, of course, gets me even more stressed. And then I regret committing to those smaller things. And then I just stick with them because I keep worrying about letting so many people down and having become a pain in their asses due to my unreliability. I stick to those small things, half-heartedly, telling myself that I love these things in order to make the rest of the world happy and feel secure that I am where I want to be. And then I back out, at the last possible moment, thinking that it's the right thing to do, only to realize that I had been letting people down but also wasted a valuable amount of their time.
It's how this whole mess of "me" got started in the first place.
Piano. At the age of six, a nice wooden upright piano showed up in my family's living room. The next thing I know, Mom's sending me to classes twice a week with a woman who never carried a frown on her face... no matter how many times I screwed up. I couldn't sight-read music to save my life, and at home, Mom would sit next to me and play the scales and point to the sheet music to make sure I was following along. She would hover over my head and to this day, I remember her voice echoing things like "follow the liiiine nooote" so harshly that it would send a ringing to my little six year old ears.
I grew up around the piano, and played like it was a chore. Like it was the same thing expected from me as much as making my bed in the morning to brushing my teeth at night. Clockwork. The fact that I couldn't pick up sight-reading in music was what frustrated me, and so at some point I just backtracked into playing music by ear. Does that note sound right? Wait. No. How about now? Or now? This got me through my [expensive] piano lessons, while right behind me, my sister was picking up sight-reading like a third language. She swept the scales and slammed onto those keys like she meant business, the callousness in her fingers already showing more music potential than me. I improvised and tried to figure out how to play popular theme songs from film... always by the right hand. Playtime at the piano. It made something that I had considered a chore to have an element of fun. And then came my overall guilt of making something out of all these lessons.
Dear God, I thought. I just need one song to show that I have a little bit of talent in this thing. What song could I do that will at least prove that I learned something all these years? I didn't exactly find it, but I borrowed it from my cousin (another grand pianist) because I was too lazy to look. She had been practicing "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven during the time that she came to live with my family, and of her many acts of kindness, she taught me the first part to that piece. Sight-reading had nothing to do with it, for me. My cousin basically held my hand with those piano keys, and my teacher thought I had built a passion overnight. She thought it was a gift that I was learning this piece so quickly and so emotionally, where in reality, I was doing it because someone had already learned it. The gift was that I knew how to pretend it was mine.
Wouldn't you know, I entered a piano competition in eight grade and played that piece (with sheet music, for presentation purposes) flawlessly with my fingers. When I got the voice message from my piano teacher telling me the good news: I won a gold medal!, my face didn't change. Maybe my heart skipped a beat, but that was it. Cool. I won big! But it wasn't the matter of life or death to me. The piano was something I just grew accustomed to seeing and playing every day, like I enjoyed those fun moments when I sat down to it, but in the end... it didn't carry my soul. What's funny is that I look back and think about pianos as inanimate objects with so much soul in them, waiting to be opened by the person who manages to sit there.
My sister had that gift naturally, and my other sister had her brief stint at trying it out, too.
It's amazing how you can find a piece of creative self-expression and immediately feel like it's home to you. Sometimes you can dread picking it up because the practice is brutal, but you eventually can start feeling the noise of your reality just fade and become relaxing and quiet.
I feel it whenever I write and when I draw.
That's probably why it's so emotionally frustrating to commit to them day-by-day.
Because if that's where your soul is, it's going to take a lot of digging and experimenting and practicing in order to get home.
This, of course, gets me even more stressed. And then I regret committing to those smaller things. And then I just stick with them because I keep worrying about letting so many people down and having become a pain in their asses due to my unreliability. I stick to those small things, half-heartedly, telling myself that I love these things in order to make the rest of the world happy and feel secure that I am where I want to be. And then I back out, at the last possible moment, thinking that it's the right thing to do, only to realize that I had been letting people down but also wasted a valuable amount of their time.
It's how this whole mess of "me" got started in the first place.
Piano. At the age of six, a nice wooden upright piano showed up in my family's living room. The next thing I know, Mom's sending me to classes twice a week with a woman who never carried a frown on her face... no matter how many times I screwed up. I couldn't sight-read music to save my life, and at home, Mom would sit next to me and play the scales and point to the sheet music to make sure I was following along. She would hover over my head and to this day, I remember her voice echoing things like "follow the liiiine nooote" so harshly that it would send a ringing to my little six year old ears.
I grew up around the piano, and played like it was a chore. Like it was the same thing expected from me as much as making my bed in the morning to brushing my teeth at night. Clockwork. The fact that I couldn't pick up sight-reading in music was what frustrated me, and so at some point I just backtracked into playing music by ear. Does that note sound right? Wait. No. How about now? Or now? This got me through my [expensive] piano lessons, while right behind me, my sister was picking up sight-reading like a third language. She swept the scales and slammed onto those keys like she meant business, the callousness in her fingers already showing more music potential than me. I improvised and tried to figure out how to play popular theme songs from film... always by the right hand. Playtime at the piano. It made something that I had considered a chore to have an element of fun. And then came my overall guilt of making something out of all these lessons.
Dear God, I thought. I just need one song to show that I have a little bit of talent in this thing. What song could I do that will at least prove that I learned something all these years? I didn't exactly find it, but I borrowed it from my cousin (another grand pianist) because I was too lazy to look. She had been practicing "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven during the time that she came to live with my family, and of her many acts of kindness, she taught me the first part to that piece. Sight-reading had nothing to do with it, for me. My cousin basically held my hand with those piano keys, and my teacher thought I had built a passion overnight. She thought it was a gift that I was learning this piece so quickly and so emotionally, where in reality, I was doing it because someone had already learned it. The gift was that I knew how to pretend it was mine.
Wouldn't you know, I entered a piano competition in eight grade and played that piece (with sheet music, for presentation purposes) flawlessly with my fingers. When I got the voice message from my piano teacher telling me the good news: I won a gold medal!, my face didn't change. Maybe my heart skipped a beat, but that was it. Cool. I won big! But it wasn't the matter of life or death to me. The piano was something I just grew accustomed to seeing and playing every day, like I enjoyed those fun moments when I sat down to it, but in the end... it didn't carry my soul. What's funny is that I look back and think about pianos as inanimate objects with so much soul in them, waiting to be opened by the person who manages to sit there.
My sister had that gift naturally, and my other sister had her brief stint at trying it out, too.
It's amazing how you can find a piece of creative self-expression and immediately feel like it's home to you. Sometimes you can dread picking it up because the practice is brutal, but you eventually can start feeling the noise of your reality just fade and become relaxing and quiet.
I feel it whenever I write and when I draw.
That's probably why it's so emotionally frustrating to commit to them day-by-day.
Because if that's where your soul is, it's going to take a lot of digging and experimenting and practicing in order to get home.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Seriously?
(Rebecca Dautremer knows good faces)Spring Break is here now, and I came back from a fun weekend in Cleveland, Ohio, visiting a former college roommate. =) Sometimes I just can't believe the time flies by so fast... like how it's almost been 4 years since she and I were roommates, planning out our summer after graduation.
Life sort of takes us places we can't imagine. I went to Boston, she went to D.C., a year later I moved back to Chicago while she stayed in D.C. Flash forward to now, and I'm still here in Chicago while she's living in Cleveland and finally establishing a serious relationship with her guy and raising a wonderful puppy. Life really is precious, and it's not about the numbers or the jobs or the drama that happens on the outside, but rather how you grow with dealing with those situations.
Next weekend, I'm heading out to San Francisco to meet with my potential roommates and go apartment-searching for the Fall. I'm nervous, excited, and a little stressed to think about everything I need to take into consideration. I have my good moments, where I think 'sure, this'll work out, no problem!' but then I think about the other things... like my cat, my current salary, my health questions, and my family - how they'll be continuing with their routines without me. It's ridiculous, considering that everyone's pretty much adults now, but the worries are still there. I think I've been the one holding on to my youth the longest, trying to tell myself that I don't have to grow up and take responsibilities until I'm older. I can't make overnight rash decisions anymore, nor can I really tell myself that if something doesn't work out, it's no big deal.
I've been like that for quite a long time.
Now I have to own up to these decisions and be fully aware of the consequences they bring me, and not cry because I'm scared to deal with it. To instead, be happy that I'm putting up a brave a face and thinking for myself for the first time in my life.
San Francisco should be interesting.
But wow! There's a lot that I gotta do for April:
- Work on my ACEN '11 Avatar buttons to sell there!
- Turn 27. Get a MacBook Pro.
- Finish my sister's painting.
- Start another painting.
- Decide whether or not I want to keep my cat for next year.
- Apply for summer barista jobs.
- Do some animatics on my new lightbox!
- Drink less coffee and milk. = (
- Keep up with my classes and pick my Fall semester classes.
- Get my feet wet with the business sector of community arts in my new internship! =D
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