Fixpert

I was digging through my old letters and drawings for this post about my history as an illustrator and I came across some gems.

I was probably 7 or 8 when I wrote this. The Maggie which I refer to was our family dog, of course. This is the only old letter of mine that I found that was written in cursive, clearly I was trying to be more formal with the esteemed Santa.

I can’t decide if this is just a gut-wrenchingly earnest and endearing letter, or if at the time I was doubtful about the existence of Santa Claus and this was meant to be an extremely manipulative guilt trip for my Dad. Either way, Santa didn’t get off his fat ass to give God the message for another 15 years, but eventually Dad did quit smoking.

I was 5 when I wrote this. I was down in South Carolina with my brother and sister visting our Grandparents. The only thing I remember about this trip was the jellyfish incident.

The thing I love about this letter is what an utter and complete understatement it is. Technically, I was not stung by a jellyfish, I was stung by a 16 foot long Portuguese Man o’ War. From Wikipedia:

…[Man o' War] stings have been responsible for several deaths, but usually only cause excruciating pain…

Ha! Only excruciating pain! I couldn’t swim yet, but I had a little floaty ring thing in the ocean and was bobbing around, maxxing out in the warm South Carolina water. My Grandad saw it coming for me, he screamed, and struggled to get to me before I got stung, but it was too late and the bastard’s tentacles wrapped completely around my legs. I don’t remember much after that except for people pulling me onto the beach and a painful process of them trying to get the tentacles off of me, since they continue to sting anything that touches them even after detached from the Man o’War’s body.

I was bed-ridden with a fever from the poison, my legs were just raw and torn up. I remember a doctor actually made a house call to come and see me, and I remember they sprinkled Meat Tenderizer on the open wounds, which is basically salt and that stung even more. I think I was a bit offended about them tenderizing my legs too.

I assume after all that tramau, I was really missing my Mom and wanted to write her a letter about my experience.

In a bizarre, but delightful, twist of events, my illustration work is suddenly in demand. Weird, hu? I haven’t done anything to pursue any side work, but in the last month I’ve been contacted with illustration requests for 7 or 8 different projects.

Five Year Old Me Knew What Was Up

It’s pretty cool. I feel like the universe is trying to tell me something. If you could jump in Bill and Ted’s phone booth and go back to 1983 when I was 5 and ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would’ve said “a Cartoonist.” Same with 1986, 1989, on and on. For me Cartoonist didn’t mean Animator, it just meant someone that drew cartoony pictures, which is exactly what I do now in my free time and during meetings at work.

This is the type of sweet shit you could find me drawing in 1986.

There was a certain point where the world convinced me that you can’t make a living doing drawings, and that doodling cartoons was childish and not a legitimate form of expression. Around the same time I had bought myself a video camera and was becoming interested in video editing — this is pre-Interweb.

Art School: Art vs. Design

Then I went to Art School thinking that I’d probably wind up doing something with video production. I bounced around majors, from Kinetic Imagery (video and animation), to Illustration, to Sculpture, and finally to Digital Imagery (a hodge podge of Typography, Illustration, 3D modelling and animation). Those bounces represented my willingness or unwillingness to take risks at various times, and me trying to find a happy medium between self-expression and marketability — two things that I thought were in opposition to one another.

Art school is a weird place. I attended Virginia Commonwealth University, which is a state school known for having an excellent art and design program. At VCU, there is a certain divisiveness between “real art” and “commercial art” aka, design. The Painting and Printmaking majors poo-poo’d the Commerical Arts majors as being sell-outs. The CA majors laughed at how the Painting and Printmaking majors would never make a living.

I found it odd that you really had to choose sides and that there wasn’t a happy medium. A lot of this had to do with the structure of the Departments, that they had seperate budgets and discouraged cross-pollinating with the courses you took, and a bit of an elitist attitude within the CA department.

Totally random sketchbook page from 2004. Bert is mooning Inspector Gadget.

Follow Your Bliss, Unless It’s Risky!

In America, there is a certain premium placed on “following your bliss.” You’re usually told to listen to your gut, follow your dreams and stuff like that. It sounds so easy, but when you have respectable mentors in your life encouraging you to take safe paths and avoid risk, suddenly things get muddy. Unless, of course, it’s your dream to become an Accountant. So, one challenge in following your passion is a willingness to not listen to what some of the smart people in your life tell you. It’s a tricky thing.

But, ultimately for me, things came full circle. People are asking me for my “cartoons” pretty consistently now. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s art or design. I just like to draw, and I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember. I think I’ll probably be drawing for the rest of my life.

The Stack of Sketchbooks in My Closet

And my sketchbooks are the best record of my life, what I was going through and how I was feeling at certain times, what external influences were affecting my style, what insecurities I was experiencing. When I’m happy or in love, there are pages and pages of exploding flowers, birds, fruit, bold and confident lines. When I’m bummed, my lines are sketchy and uncertain, all my characters have bags under their eyes and look sickly (or, worse, I stop drawing altogether).

An entire visual language has naturally developed over time to represent how I’m feeling, and I would have never noticed if I wasn’t able to flip through years of sketchbooks. One of the best things I’ve got going right now is my nightly sketchbook journal. I can see patterns in my life emerging just by flipping through the pages.

Anyway, I could say a lot more about drawing, I just thought it was neat that without deliberately pursuing it as a career path, requests for my drawings are coming in, I guess just because I’ve continued to draw for fun throughout my entire life.