Drawing Session 6 - Mic Artistic Workshop

Today we had a workshop with Mic Artistic instead of our usual sessions with Tom. Id been looking forward to this workshop for some days now, as we were told all three years of animation students would be attending. We show up, and there’s roughly a bakers dozen of us, instead of the expected 40. No surprise for the animation department really. Mic Artistic introduced himself, and talked about his past 30 years of life, making income through his art and music, although as the session progressed, I began to believe his income was primarily from his music. Although his stories were entertaining, infact I believe he has led quite an interesting life with many a tale to tell to peak your curiosity. But he did say it hasn't been a very wealthy path, financially. This is something I've heard before, and still don’t like hearing, especially with the amount of money me and my fellow students are investing in learning these skills, that are apparently not worth very much in the real world. We were told my Mic that we would be working only in pens for this session, and only on paper bags, which was Mic's medium, and used to create everything of his.

The first exercise was drawing a very quick and squiggly portrait of our partner, only observing our partner, and not looking at the paper at all. Obviously this isn’t something most, including me could follow to a tee, but I tried to keep my eyes on my partner as much as I could, while still making sure It wasn’t becoming an abomination on the page. Here is the result:

Not really much to say about this. 5 minutes to create it and not looking at the page isn’t going to create a masterpiece.

The second exercise was creating a real portrait of our partner, this time given 15 minutes, so there was plenty of time to give detail and focus on the work. Here it is:

I'm much happier with this than the one before, as the extra 10 minutes gave us the time to add the detail necessary to bring the drawing to life. According to Mic, I had successfully captured the expression shown on my partner's face. I was happy with this piece, as I felt the pen lines were bold and strong around the eyes and nose, successfully having captured my partner's mood.

The third exercise was to create a comic strip, illustrating an original song of Mic Artistic. I choose this song to illustrate, as it seemed the one with the easiest narrative to follow:

Here is the comic strip I drew, we were given 20 minutes on this particular one:

I don’t really have any strong feeling about this one way or another. I did it very basic, with not much detail because of the time limit, so it didn’t really challenge my skill or anything of that manner. So as an education exercise it wasn’t beneficial, rather just a fun 20 minute doodle session.

The next exercise was creating a caricature of our partner, here is my work:  

Again, no real strong feelings for this particualar piece. Ive never really liked caricatures, either looking at them or creating them.

The last exercise was picking a pen at random from Mic's collection, and creating a small fictionally written story about the pen's history. I wrote a small story about it being a killer robot built by the US to kill Kim Jong Un, and included a small illustration of it:

Again, this exercise had no real benefit, other than a fun 15 minutes.

Overall, I felt the session with Mic Artistic was exactly how it was described in the email – A fun drawing session – and wasn’t much else. The main take away from this session was Mic's personal advice to us about life and work. Is it better to be doing something you enjoy with your life? Rather than having 'enough' money, but hating your job? This is a question I still don’t have an answer to. But with the information I've learned today about us not being told about script writing sessions, the film school seems to have made the choice for me. I will be broke with no money, and have no real world animating skills learned from university to do what I'm 'passionate' about. Terrific, ain’t it?