Paper or Photoshop? Why not both!?

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?

Yes! Take my hard drive, but don’t take my sketchbook!

I always have to ask, why do people steal things from others? Growing up I believed it to be one of few things; the objects were for monetary value, they were kleptomaniacs, or they would steal just to prove a point to the world. I found myself asking the very same thing again this past week where, for the first time in my life, someone stole something from me; my external hard drive. At first I was angry, furious even. I wanted to break down and cry and just yell at the world. As the minutes searching my school for the missing hard drive drew on, so did my anger. I let it stew long enough however, that my voice of reason finally kicked in.

While I was fumbling furiously through my bag yet again, hoping that maybe it was wedged somewhere under the pile of random objects hiding in there, I noticed my lone turquoise sketchbook tucked away safely in it’s corner unharmed. It was unbent, gleaming white and clean and yet severely abused and used. It was my baby, and it was safe. I realized at that moment that it didn’t matter what idiot at my school was carrying around a damaged pink external hard drive claiming it was their own. All that mattered and all that was important to me was inside this sketchbook. It contained all my valuable information  and concepts regarding all the projects I have worked on, all of my mistakes and accomplishments in drawing, gesture poses that would resemble preschool scribbles to the untrained eye, and more importantly, it was my secret escape into the workings of my own mind that no one will ever see.

Pencil or Wacom tablet? That is the question.

The class started out as predictable as all of the others I had taken at college. It was normal, except for the woman in the bright red kimono in the back of the room. She didn’t look like an undergraduate student and was seemingly out of place in her glaring red attire. I looked around the room at my peers and I seemed to be the only person who was actually surprised by her wardrobe choice. Our professor entered the room and motioned for the woman in the kimono to come up to the front. And the thing that happened next still shocks me to this day–she dropped her kimono. I was pretty sure Intro to Animation wasn’t a nude figure drawing class, but apparently I read the course description wrong. I quickly averted my eyes in a mix of horror and embarrassment. I couldn’t believe it. Why was I here? Wasn’t this supposed to be a Digital Arts class? What did this have to do with animation?

At the time, I was no artist. I had never taken fine arts class before. And in all honesty, there was a reason…