Saturday 30 August 2014

Smarter Art School

So I've been a bit lax with posts for a good chunk of the year, mostly coinciding with getting my current concept job with Playground Games, and taking on a good chunk of freelance alongside it, none of which I can really show yet. But I'm going to get back into the habit of posting again, now that my schedule is no longer manic with crunch time and crazy weekends of working.

The main thing in my life right now is that I'm about to start a 12 week course with Smart School (online learning resource set up by the creator of the Illustration Master Class, Rebecca Guay). The course is taught by none other than Iain McCaig and has a focus on world building and story telling. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this course. Yes, they're pricey but the class size is small and we get 3 hours of  Iain's time live every week along with personal feedback. I've always been self taught; it's going to be awesome to actually have one of my art idols looking over my virtual shoulder for almost 3 months.

So my first pre-class assignment was to create a self portrait, based around the questions of what we wanted out of the course and what had stopped us doing it already ourselves. I wrote a small novel (me? really?) but the tldr version boiled down to me being very torn between two styles of working and basically being at a bit of  a standstill because of it. Chains of my own doing, that are really becoming a burden that I need to let go of and focus on one thing for a while to get that elusive consistency in my work.  The self portrait is a somewhat metaphorical representation of that. It's also not an easy painting for me to share -  it feels intensely private letting others see my struggle, even in a still image.