Art school memories & a pleasant surprise.

Packing things away and I came across this ancient relic.

It’s a large plastic portfolio. 26” inches in width, so it could hold the 2 foot long canvasses and oversized pads of sketch paper I had to drag on the city bus. It's held together with duct tape, it split apart many ways.

The very portfolio I used when I was in Sheridan college, a lifetime ago.

It's an easy choice to discard this now. I am miles ahead of where I was at the time. There's nothing worth keeping. The best was already gifted away. This is what remained.

Constructive criticism, and well deserved. I hated technical drawing back then, it was a huge struggle point for me and I did everything ass backwards. I won't share the art, it was bad enough lol.

My two cents on the art school debate;

Every artist needs humbling. There are things & life experiences that can't be learned on YouTube.

But supplies are not free at Art school. And they expect you to use student grade or higher which is more expensive. I was poor when I went, I wouldn't have been able to go at all if not for the disability scholarships I won for being part deaf.

The scholarships only paid me to get in the door. I was calling home begging for every penny every week because there was always some new art supply I'd need to buy that was expected of us by the teachers that I couldn't afford.

I say join a live drawing class or two in your town if you can. Get to talking to the local art teachers. In person. You could pay for their advice on your portfolio. This is thousands of dollars cheaper than art school would be, and the humbling is just the same. Take that advice, watch the tutorials, learn, create, go back and get another paid review. Keep doing this till you feel you've grown & people pay you for your art.

I know I've complained a lot about my experiences at school. I did have some really enjoyable classes and teachers who absolutely inspired me as well. I thrived in drawing class, everything was worth exploring and fun to try. I was obsessed with hatching techniques on toned paper. This piece brings back fun memories.

I was stubborn though, chose random hills to die on for sure. Like this one, I insisted that all knees were boxy in shape at the time. And drew a boxy knee here despite the actual model not having boxy knees/or the position didn't display boxiness. This was a point of discussion. I needed the humbling to objectively look at what I'm illustrating.

So I was in Art Fundamentals. This was a course that combined a bit of everything one needed to enter animation. If you didn't make the animation portfolio cut (Disney hired graduates directly off the floor at the time when I was there) you would go for Art Fundamentals to get you in the door, fine tune your art style and try again.

I like big black lines around my art. Always have, always will. This didn't do me any favors in graphic design or painting classes when the black lines were deemed unnecessary.

I was very surprised to find an ok mark and some positive critique from my painting teacher. My one public negative experience with her, overshadowed the 6 months I worked with her and I forgot I made some minor improvements in my color theory and style, enough for her to soften up on me.

This is called using a “scumbling” technique. Scumbling is the art of scrubbing an undiluted, opaque, and generally pale pigment across others for special textural effects or to raise the key of a dark-coloured area.

The canvas was originally painted red, so when I scumbled the colors across the red it came out this way. Roughly textured and intriguing. It's one of my favorite techniques to still use.

Part of submitting art in some classes meant preparing up a written critique of your own painting. This helped develope a critic's eye pov, which is key to have when working as a freelancer with no feedback. If I didn't know what went wrong in my art, how could I ever improve it?

That being said, I was also kind of bullshitting my way through it a bit too. Poor grammar and run on sentences- I was doing the bare minimum on the critiques. I was an open wound mentally at the time and felt like the worst artist to ever exist. (Dramatic again).

I'll keep that “B” mark in mind. I didn't do that bad after all. A pleasant surprise indeed.

In a boomer voice “when I was your age I had to take two city busses to get from one side of Oakville to the other side to get to Sheridan. I would be carrying a backpack full of paint on my shoulders, this giant heavy portfolio in one hand, AND a toolbox in my other hand. My toolbox kept all my artist tools in it, rulers, markers, paintbrushes. This is what traditional artists had to do. And living in Canada meant I was dragging the portfolio through blizzards, sometimes the rain and snow we experienced during our commuting fucked our art up. I’d have to walk a mile in the sleet snow to the school doorsteps.-”

So it’s goodbye old friend. You bring me more “ehhhhhh” memories than good memories and my current art is nothing like what's in there. I took the lessons I learned at Sheridan, and I applied them to what I'm drawing now.