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My Path To Syndication, PART 2: No Art School For Old Superheroes
By Paul | August 7, 2008
I’d heard that all you needed grade-wise to get into art school was a grade 12 with a 60% average, which I accomplished by taking the easiest courses I could get away with and dropping out of any classes I couldn’t pass without studying. It is not necessary to not study to become a cartoonist, it’s just the path I took. I spent the extra time drawing superheroes and submitting samples to comic book companies.
So it was that I arrived at the age of 17 for the interview at the Ontario College of Art with a portfolio full of drawings of Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. Much to my surprise this was not considered to be “art”. My “fall back” was Animation at Sheridan College. This pre-dated The Little Mermaid’s rekindling of the animation biz, a time when one could still walk into Sheridan’s animation program with a drawing of a cup and saucer with passable elliptical perspective.
This wasn’t really the program for me, though. Granted I had a few great teachers who introduced me to things like life drawing (it’s quite an eye-opener the first time a model gets naked in front of you and your fellow teenagers… it’s funny to see all these drawings of a male nude that slowly blur away into nothingness around the genital area) and line control, etc.. But the monotony of repeating the same drawing over and over with only the slightest variation in order to produce after weeks of work a 2 second film clip of a bouncing ball was much too painstaking for an impatient person like myself. I knew halfway through the first year that I’d meant to take Illustration instead of Animation.
So for my second year of college (still too young to attend any college socials involving alcohol) I switched over to Illustration at the other campus, still bent on superheroing my way to stardom. But many of the classes seemed designed to steer me away from my Fantastic Four destiny. I was forced to learn things like letter forms, color theory, photography, wood-cutting, litho prints, and a course called “Research Drawing” taught by a bizarre hillbilly-esque man who gave us assignments along the lines of “place the lima bean on the blank page. Now put your index finger on the bean, close your eyes, and move it around the page until it feels “right”.”
Now all of these classes (with the possible exception of lima bean pushing) were of definite value to my growth as an artist, but I couldn’t see that at the time. I met another kid who was just as enthusiastically uninterested in these things, and together we clowned around, skipped classes, handed in shoddy assignments, and wrote and drew our own comic books (one was called Phlebitis Man, about a guy who dosed himself with chemicals and attached a lightening rod to his head during a thunderstorm thinking he would be endowed with the power to run fast a la The Flash, but instead just got a severe case of vein inflammation… man, I wish I had a copy of that comic now). My parents, who had been supportive because of my hitherto one-tracked mind, were speechless when I got a report card full of Ds. My pal and I discussed dropping out and going to take film-making at another school. I actually went so far as to fill out an application before I came to my senses: wait a minute, doing art is all you’ve wanted to do since you were 8 years old, and people who try to become film directors in Toronto end up becoming doormen. I had to get back to art school and start drawing my pants off (figuratively).
Next: Step Aside, Thor
Topics: Path To Syndication |
Comments
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August 7th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
nice! I really enjoyed reading it
August 7th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Very interesting…so…whose buttocks are we seeing in the last example??
Lulu
August 7th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Paul
Funny to hear (read) you talk about this. I went to Pratt, as an illustration major, and your mention of not seeing the value of the lesson at the time, is totally true. Things like gesture drawing came in handy when doing storyboard work, and other stuff with quick turn-around times.
Great post!
August 8th, 2008 at 4:21 am
It’s great that you got focus again when you were still young. Many of us ended up with careers much like doormen by failing to have focus until much too late.
August 8th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
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November 25th, 2008 at 7:00 am
[…] of his formative years in elementary school, sure of what he wanted to be when he grew up; Part 2: A divergence into animation and a return to illustration and Part 3 delves into college and doing illustrations for the Ottawa Citizen Newspaper. Watch […]
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