Right now figure drawing is making me miserable and despondent. I suck at it. Even getting to look at naked people half an hour a day is little to no consolation.
Right now the idea of becoming an animator (let alone a maker of animated films and other media) seems like a stupid pipe dream, a fancy and a fantasy that’s not worth chasing. I look at the work of other people (anyone else catch the Annies today?) and think how the fuck do they come up with that? that’s amazing. i’m crap. i’m worse than crap for even thinking i could occupy the same art form as them. And similar things. Every demo reel. Every awards ceremony. Every anything animated.
The thing about having lived with depression for 20 years is that it’s given me the useful practical knowledge that emotions, while useful under some circumstances, do me no good here. Quite the opposite – feeling despondent here is a flat out hindrance.
Intellectually, beyond the emotional soup, i’m just having a bad night. Everything seems impossible and pointless and anxiety-inducing right this second, but soon everything will be back on course again. I just have to have faith in the process of learning by doing, somehow, and that if i keep doing what i’m doing, it’ll click for me in a way i can’t currently imagine because it hasn’t clicked yet.
It’s normal to be despondent sometimes. And strangely enough, feeling despondent tends to mean a breakthrough is imminent. Just have to keep banging away at it.
I’d post some of these figure drawings but they’re not much to look at. Just badly drawn stick figures. But i am drawing a lot of them and inattentively reading anatomy books to try to make sense of how the human body is connected together. It’s sinking in slowly.
Yesterday morning i wrote a draft treatment for that story i want to tell. The core idea is there and there’s some good material there along with it but it’s not a good enough telling to go to boards with yet. I don’t think it’s going to win any awards but it’s worth doing.
The book The Animator’s Eye by Francis Glebas got read amongst everything else. It was a good read, very comprehensive.
Time to crit some gesture drawings and go to sleep.
