It’s the eve of finals week, which in a college student’s perspective means that for the past three weeks I have slept an average of 2-3 hours every day, helped to continue to progression of the carpal tunnel symptoms in my right hand, have exhausted my eyes so much that my roommates go back and forth in thinking either I am constantly crying my eyes out or am on some form of drug, and have made the living room couch my new makeshift bed, and of course; there is Starbucks.
It was here that I was “studying” with a few of my friends who are in the business school. While they were actually studying, I was across the table from them blankly staring off into space with my pencil in my hand and my last two pages of sketchbook, desperately trying to come up with a concept for my last Maya animation short of the semester. The minute the ideas started to flow, I sketched rapidly and quickly and before I knew it, my two pages were gone. So I had no choice but to switch to Starbucks napkins, though luckily the barista kept seeing me get up and grabbing one or two more and felt so bad for the crazy girl in the corner that he brought me some Starbucks paper bags to draw on.
Apparently looking like a ridiculous fool, one of my friends finally chimed in with a helpful suggestion. “Melissa, why don’t you just draw all of that on Photoshop? It would save you a ton of time and you wouldn’t be wasting paper!”
I thought about it, that much was true. If you could draw with a tablet well it would save time. But is that really how it should be done? Should all brainstorming be done on the computer? Or is there something more meaningful and necessary that paper can bring you that Photoshop layers can’t? Continue reading
Taking Art to the Next Level 