Three Art-making Thoughts

Inspired by an anime, a novelist and a Hall-of-Fame illustrator

I have three art-making related thoughts to share today. They feel scattered in my brain and I wonder if they have any reason to be written about together. But I’ve always felt that the act of writing forces the tangled ball of thoughts to go down a funnel, where only one word at a time can come out in a neat string- spitting out an order of things. The order may be arbitrary at first, but it’s much easier to rearrange words on a page than it is to rearrange thoughts in a brain.

So here we go, Art-making Thought One:

A few months ago, THE famed illustrator Yuko Shimizu came to Bucharest as part of Romanian Design Week, for which she juried the Illustration section (3 of my projects got in, yay!)- and she also held a presentation about, well, working as an illustrator. One of her slides was something like this:

The mountain of ambition. This doodle is my tacky recreation, Yuko’s slide was much more gorgeous but you’ll just have to catch her prez to see it, teehee.

“Target” here meaning ambition- she says that in whatever you do; it’s better to aim high- because even if you don’t quite manage to get where you aimed, you’ll work much harder than if you aimed lower, and you’ll inevitably end up at a higher place than you imagined you were capable of.

Hearing this came at a very helpful time for me. At the time, I was working on my idea for the Animest spot, (the spot meaning the official festival film playing at the start of every screening) which was… well, it would turn out to be the most ambitious thing I had ever proposed to do, with no confidence that I’d manage to pull it off, execution wise.

I didn’t set out to make the most ambitious animation. My only brief is to make something with this year’s theme: “Urban Frames”. I felt there’s opportunity for music to add atmosphere to this… “urbanness”, so I searched for a local band whose sound fits. Of course, if I’m going to have to listen to the same song thousands of times while animating, I should at least like it very much to begin with. Found the song, got the go-ahead both from the band and Animest. (I’d love to tell you who the band is but I’m not sure if Animest wants it to be a surprise, so I’ll keep mum in public space for now. But if you’re a friend, ask me and I’ll tell you. They are SO. Cool.)

I sat down finding images that fit both the theme and the song. The images turned into a story somewhat, and I storyboarded on a timeline to flesh it out. The idea turns out to be quite a gargantuan task to execute- at least it would be for one person, me- in just 3-4 months.

A side effect of being a full-time freelance illustrator for more than a decade is that you tend to make safe promises to the client. No one wants to hear “I’m going to try do something I’ve never done before and don’t know if I’ll manage but it could be so amazing?” While I do think I’m working at my upper limits of my abilities when it comes to personal work, I don’t do this with commissioned projects.

Yuko’s very timely slide gave me the permission to aim higher than my abilities, because it clarified to me the fact that the end result will be much more awesome than if I had proposed something much simpler. And if thousands of people will have to sit through this same spot over and over again at the start of every screening during Animest, well, I think I owe it to them to make something a little interesting to watch. (Within the limits of my own taste, of course. I can’t control that everyone will like it. I can only control if someone who shares my taste will like it. Can you tell I’m trying to calm myself?)

The only tricky thing is to get over my vanity. All is well and good if the viewers of the spot don’t actually know what I was aiming for, and see it plain as day that I fell flat on my face! But luckily my own excitement for wanting to see how this idea will take its final form won over my cheap sabotagey vanity. So I made the animatic proposal and everyone was on board, and uh, I’ve been working on it since mid May, in between other work and a few short travels.

Since then there’s been a LOT of mental ups and downs when working on this animation- I’ll spare you the drama about how I can’t sleep at night thinking about how much there is to do and get up from bed after two hours of tossing and turning and work at 4 am but right now I’m about 85% done with it, and my deadline is at the end of the month. There’s a lot of anxiety of whether or not I’ll manage to do all the things I want to do in all the scenes in this time, but I am absolutely happy with how it’s looking.

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Art-making Thought Two:

I like picking up books about writing because writers are exceptionally good at explaining their creative process in writing. Duh. Recently I picked up Haruki Murakami’s “Novelist As A Vocation”:

Yes, I’m aware of recent opinions on how terribly he depicts female characters, but my motto is that there’s always something we can learn from each other

I really enjoyed this, not necessarily as a “How To” book, but more as contextual frame for his background and efforts, to partly explain why his books have experienced the overwhelming success that they did. (You can be an introvert and refuse to do public events but you better be prepared to fly across the Pacific ocean to meet the New Yorker editor in person to show them your work during a long-gone-era when they still welcomed walk-ins, is one of the takeaways I got from this)

But being the vain/insecure person that I am, I’m always thrilled to hear that I share the same thoughts or routine as a respected author/artist. His routine being running. An insane amount, in fact. I’m not quoting exactly, but he says something about how it’s important to keep your body tip-top condition, so that you can perform your best when writing. He even quotes a study observing new brain neurons and synapses being born during exercise and disappearing after 24 hours or something.

I don’t run, not any amount, but I do keep up with physical exercises. Nothing as dignified as a solitary run during early hours when the rest of the world is still in bed though. I rotate 3-4 youtube videos in my living room, following pilates and cardio routines by Amy and Dreaming Green Gals, every other day.

When I started a few years ago, it was such a drag. I hate sweating, as do most sensible people. I was always suspicious of people who said they enjoy exercising. Who are you trying to impress? But I kept doing it- growing up experiencing asian fatphobia has its advantages.

After a while though, I started noticing that if I skipped exercises, my body started feeling… not great. My back and butt gets achey from the hours sitting when drawing, way faster than when I don’t skip. And because I’m a creature of comfort, I give up easily- as in, if sitting in a chair makes me physically comfortable, I will absolutely walk away from that chair. And guess how much work gets done when I’m not in a chair? Zilch.

So I started seeing these exercise sessions not just as futile resistance to entropy self-care, but an act of protecting my art-making. I still moan and grunt and say “F-you Amy” during a tough exercise routine but this extra sense of purpose does help me to keep on with it.

I even had this idea in my head that if I can train myself to stick out the tough parts of an exercise, this discipline might translate into sticking out the tough parts of art-making. I remember having this thought consciously when I was learning After Effects, the god-awful program that famously has a tough learning curve. Don’t know if my theory is right, but I can safely say I’m pretty comfortable in AE now.

TLDR- Exercise is good for you. Do it.

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Art-making Thought Three:

I watched Blue Period on netflix (based on a manga) lately, it’s an anime about Yaguchi, a high-schooler who belatedly discovers drawing as a new passion and decides to take the exam to get into the notoriously-hard-to-get-into- Tokyo Art University. The premise is absolutely endearing to me of course, and I find myself nodding vigorously every 5 minutes as he discovers ways of seeing art, ways of relating to art, ways of making art. There are many lines that resonated, but these two moments made me feel SO seen:

Side character A: I’m no match for someone like you who’s determined and working hard.

Yaguchi: Hmm.. It sounds nice when you call it “hard work”. But I’m just scared of not doing so.

And here, an internal monologue:

Yaguchi: I don’t think my art is better than anyone else’s in the world. There are plenty of people better than me. But still, more than anyone else in the world, I have expectations for my art. 

Who is cutting oniiooooons?????

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So I ended up just writing one thought after another without any obvious connection to any of them. But maybe there is one one, as they’re thoughts that keep me going during these difficult but creatively fulfilling months. Hopefully there’ll be many more of this kind of months in my life.

Till later!

Nini