(Source: thefrogman, via religionisbullshit)
Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.
—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones (via voetry)
(Source: winterkristall, via voetry)
From Anthony Holden!
What are studios looking for? How can I get into a good animation school? What should I be studying?
I get a lot of these types of questions now and again, and I never know how to answer them. I can’t be sure of what studios are looking for, I don’t control admissions policies to schools, and I have little idea what makes for a current and relevant curriculum. There are a lot of variables in your bid for a career in animation, and it’s kind of impossible to control most of them. You must be crazy to want this job!
I find it helpful to focus on the things I can control. Among those things are your study habits and how you spend your personal time. It’s good to work hard and have goals—without them we would get nowhere. Study hard and make decisive strides towards achieving your art goals. But in the heat of that pursuit, don’t forget to go out and live your life!
If you spend any amount of time looking at artists online, you’ve probably figured out by now that there are about a million dudes and dudettes in internetville who draw better than you (I relive this realization daily). Once your have done your best to rise to their level, the only tool you have to compete with these crazy talents is your background, your personal character—is you!
Consider developing your whole self with the same raw focus and intensity that you develop a particular skill set. Get focused. Go out, have adventures. Run, jump, skin your knee, fall in love, root loudly for the away team at a baseball game, barely escape a crash of stampeding rhinos, live to see another day. Experience things big and small. Go for a walk. The world is full of wonders.
I know this advice is not particularly animation-specific, but maybe that’s for the best. At any rate, it is something I feel strongly about. Animation is great, and there are few things that I enjoy doing more than drawing and storytelling. But in order to have stories to tell, first you have to live them.
Be good, and see you soon!
PS, if you were looking for advice on draftsmanship you should probably be reading this.
This is the best advice for any student or hopeful student. Having lived your life watching cartoons and drawing in your room won’t help you to make stories that involve doing much. I’m a total homebody, but doing things that force you to experience life in different ways is key. So just go to a new place, talk to the weird guy on the street, try a new food, whatever. It will enrich your life and the stories you tell.
Needed this little reminder.
I’m glad I took two years after college to travel and explore and find my way in the world. So much more valuable a learning experience then jumping into a dead-end job or going in blind.
(via forever-the-optimist)
Your riotous living, curiosity, gusto, amorality, sentimentality are enough to fill a hundred books. You have never known stagnation. You make me believe that introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy. You want to leave a scar on the world. And you - why you put things so clearly and beautifully to me - so crystal clear - it looks simple and true. You are so terribly clever, so nimble. I distrust your cleverness. You make wonderful patterns; everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear: too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions - so that one only thinks one has been given all your thought, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers; you are bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You’re the thinker who arouses the most confusion and exaltation in me, most doubts, most mystery, most disturbances. You are whole, powerful, every word uttered by you hits the mark. I love our talks; they have a firm, exhilarating interplay, resilience.
—Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol.2: 1934-1939 (via violentwavesofemotion)
(via iwrotedownmyworld)
(Source: bluewinterose, via religionisbullshit)
Variations on the Word Sleep
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.