Back to School Week

This was my first week back at school at PAFA and it was quite nice to be back in the swing of things. It seems that summer blended right into fall for me with literally less than a week break between school and work.

This week I start teaching Storyboarding to the second year students at DCAD again, next week I start teaching the same to the Uarts crowd. Add in my regular workload of freelance and my 4 day schedule at PAFA and I'm one busy artist! In past years I've had a bit of a break during the summers, but not this year. No cons, no Arizona trip, just lots of drawing and teaching, but you know, that's cool. i need the money and being super-busy is good at times when one's personal life has ups and downs, and 2008 has been a doozy.

This week I was also happy to be able to attend the demo give by Nelson Shanks over at his Studio Incominati It was a pretty packed house to watch Shank's portrait demo, and a learning exoerience too. I went along with 4-5 fellow students from PAFA, and I snapped a ton of pics and my buddy Dave took notes. It's always a great thing to watch someone very good perform, like a musician or an athlete; but one hardly ever gets to see an artist perform live.
You can learn a lot by seeing not only their palette, but their manner, application of paint, but in Shanks case you see how much he looks, how much he "sees" during his process. I'd say out of the nearly 4 hour demo , half the time was him really looking and seeing and thinking, before he would make a decision and then a stroke. That right there I think is something so many younger or inexperienced painters don't do. Myslf included. Sometimes, especially in class you feel like you have to "rush", or passion grabs you and off you go. I noticed that Shanks paced himself, he seemed to always be in the same energy painting, from start to finish.


I liked his finished picture better than most of his more finished pieces because it had a vitality to it, there was something left open, questions that the viewer could answer that to me his work sometimes lacks because of that super-finish he puts on everything.
However that is exactly the thing I'm sure most people admire about his work.

Thursday i had my first real class, John Horn's 2D anatomy class. John is such a good teacher, very calm, clear and has an easy manner about him, you can tell he's been teaching a long time. He also has a great subtle sense of humor. I look forward to having all my classes this semester and finally moving into my second year next spring. I'll be regularly posting my weekly progress here, so keep checking back. The semester is off to a great start!