Why you must make time for personal projects | Illustration Personal work is good for your growth. But many people seem to struggle with carving out the time to do it. Between paid work, family, social lives, and the absolutely human need for leisure time, setting aside chunks of time to work on our own projects can feel like a luxury, a chore, or a mirage that you can never quite reach. 01. I'm sure many are already aware of the famous "20% time" policy pioneered by Google. This policy is responsible for Gmail and a host of less sexy but still very important developments. True 20% time can uncover questions and answers we never would think to ask. 02. When we are working on the client's clock, we're not being paid for experimenting. If we have major goals which can only be achieved in personal work, that tends to be where we launch major personal projects where the goal is premeditated and the commitment is significant. We can't know which projects are going to pay out and which are going to fizzle into nothing. 03. 04. 05. 06. Like this?
Living Lines Library To Anyone Who Thinks They're Falling Behind In Life | The Huffington Post You don’t need more motivation. You don’t need to be inspired to action. You don’t need to read any more lists and posts about how you’re not doing enough. We act as if we can read enough articles and enough little Pinterest quotes and suddenly the little switch in our brain will put us into action. But, honestly, here’s the thing that nobody really talks about when it comes to success and motivation and willpower and goals and productivity and all those little buzzwords that have come into popularity: you are as you are until you’re not. You change when you want to change. And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever the fuck we are when we’re there. You’re not a robot. You don’t get to control everything. “If it’s not the time, it’s just not the fucking time. Sometimes the novel is not ready to be written because you haven’t met the inspiration for your main character yet. We all know this: Our experience cannot always be manipulated.
Daily Post-It What I've learned about combining 2D and 3D Hi y'all. I've been pretty quiet lately as I try to get my brain around how to do 3D on the cheap. I'm using a not too bad free program called Anim8or and will be bringing the results into my BG in Toon Boom. My goal has been to use 3D to create animated backgrounds for motocycled riding sequences. I've also decided I can use it for general set design as a shortcut to making my other still backgrounds. I finally put together a short clip of a camera following a theoretical biker through a turn (modeled after one I crashed on years ago). Overall, this is great news, because I found modeling the mountain to be kind of a pain in the butt and more time consuming than I want it to be. Soon enough I'll have a link to a trial shot with a rider in it. Just thought I'd check in for a few and share.
11 Second Club Temple of the Seven Golden Camels: What Makes A Good Story Portfolio/Story Artist? In the comments for my last post, J. Kelley asked in the comments if I could write about what makes a good story portfolio. I thought that was a good suggestion for a blog post, because people e-mail and ask me that from time to time. As I wrote down some thoughts, the post got longer and longer (sorry about that) and suffered from a bit of "scope creep". First, some disclaimers: I am not representing the Disney company in any way in this post. I also want to point out that I've never worked at Pixar, or DreamWorks, or Blue Sky or anywhere else. Furthermore, it is worth setting context for this post by pointing out that most of my colleagues at work would say that I am way too hard on portfolios. Clarity This is extremely important. The whole point of looking at a story portfolio is to see how that person handles the telling of a story. The other way to get perspective on your work and see if it's clear is to simply take a break and come back to it. Here is an example: TV Boards Appeal
Animation Blog In Sunday Sketching, Christoph Niemann Tells the Brutal Truth About the Creative Process © 2016 Christoph Niemann For years, Christoph Niemann spent every Sunday conducting a drawing experiment. The artist, whose illustrations have appeared in dozens of publications, including WIRED, would sit down with a blank piece of paper and a random, everyday object. He never knew what he was going to draw—only that his drawing would include whatever object was in front of him. Niemann devised hundreds of these visual puns, and now he’s collected them—along with more work from his career—in his new monograph, Sunday Sketching.
Blow up your work: How to enlarge, expand and make giant graphics - FESPA Even the latest, highest resolution digital camera can’t capture enough pixels to give truly photo-quality results on something the size of a truck or even a ship. So, how do you get artwork, especially something that needs to look like a photograph, up to huge size? Over the years a lot of techniques have emerged. We talked to Austin Coates, studio manager of UK large format specialist PressOn, who said “most of what we print is for large viewing distances. Pixel boosting The techniques for increasing (or decreasing) pixel count are generally called interpolation or resampling. Naturally Photoshop had this from the start. For enlargements, which is what we’re mainly interested in here, there’s a choice of Preserve Details, or Bicubic Smoother. If you enlarge by 300% to 500% there’s a visible difference between the three options. There are third party pixel resamplers, of which probably the most well-known is On1 Software’s Perfect Resize. What to do about PDFs? Vector perfection