Hey, I know you! You're me!

So far, this semester has been all about revelations. Not revelations like turning on a light in the dark, but more like turning on a light in a very dim room. Let me explain.

Things I thought about myself and my own interests have been reinforced: I never knew it before our class trip to the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the MMFA, but this designer's been affecting me for nearly my whole life! As a little girl infatuated with Madonna, watching the Blonde Ambition tour on tv, that gold corset made quite the impression. I never tried to dress like my idol, but somehow, at 9 years old, I could appreciate the couture. I also always marvelled at certain haute couture pieces without knowing a thing about them, and then upon seeing them at the exhibit, I went "ah! of course!"

A short-lived phase in my younger days involved becoming a Navy Seal, after having watched Steven Segal but out seriously slick moves in Under Siege. I didn't actually want to join the army; I just wanted to know the moves. As it turned out, Steven Segal is an Aikido master. Fast-forward 15 years or so, and I still think Aikido is awesome. I sign up for "Combative Fitness" as my physical education class, thinking to learn various martial arts, and it turns out my teacher is an Aikido pro. Synchronicity? Yes, please. Needless to say, this is one of my favourite classes...

I've always been "good at art", but (as I discussed in my previous post) was not one of those typically creative people (my mother will argue this, I know). I'm a perfectionist, careful and calculating, hard on myself, with high expectations. There's a place for people like me!!! It's called Graphic Design! Oh, those Fine Arts twerps can keep their interpretive line drawings and blind-contours; give me anchor points to line up or typefaces to render (and enough time to do it, mind you), or a page to layout and I'm happy!

Now that I've written this blog post (a bit overdue, maybe), I'm just going to go have a freak-out over the pile of homework I have for next week.

I'm my harshest critic.

I have this thing; I'm super critical of myself, and can be a bit self-depracating. Yeah, aren't we all, right? Hear me out, there's a lesson in here, and I learned it first-hand yesterday.

Growing up, I was always the kid who could draw. Ok, there was this other kid who was really good at drawing Garfield, but I didn't ever see him draw anything else. (His Garfield was really good, though. Flawless.) Anyway, my family always told me I was good, that I had artist's hands, and so on and so on, but I always kind of thought they were just saying that because they were my family. You know, kids are more perceptive than they're given credit for. Sometimes, my mom would shoot me a compliment, and I'd say "you're just saying that because you're my mom," to which she'd reply "no! It's because it's true!" But you know, I always kind of thought they were all bullshitting me to an extent. No clue where I learned to be this way, but I guess I started young.

In high school, it was the same. Art class was my best subject, the teacher liked me, I could draw coherent figures and use different styles…and I had a friend who was also really good. She was into anime, so she would draw those manga characters. Really well. And she could draw really well from memory. I'm more of a "see-it-and-draw-it" kind of person (I guess you'd call that "still life", but that conjures up images of chairs and flower arrangements; things I'm not great at) and I took that to be a weakness on my part. My friend and I were both asked to provide full-page drawings for use in the school yearbook, and I drew a centaur holding a scroll, with some crap in the background, and I'll admit that it's a pretty impressive drawing for a 15 year old, but I could always find fault with whatever I drew.

Fast-forward 14 years, and I'm still like that. I look around at my classmates, and I'm trying to pick out the ones who are better than me. I'm trying to compare myself.

Yesterday, though, I had a slight epiphany during my Fine Arts classes.

The first class was Basic Drawing Studies, and we had to (among other things) show a few sketches on the theme of "Transforming Futures". Long story short: how do you envision the future? Well hot dog; nobody wanted to show the class their sketches. We all felt like our sketches we crappy, undeveloped, lame, etc… but as a group, we all contributed to helping those crappy sketches (and they were not all crappy, let me tell you) transform into more interesting ideas. Lesson #1: Most people are just as insecure as you are about their art.

The next class was 2D Foundation Studies, which is basically just working with colour, with paint as your medium. We painted to music, following the teacher's guidelines, letting the music guide us, and created a piece that is abstract and non-representational. Basically, a mess of paint. Well, shit on a stick! Some were really nice, and others were more mediocre, but I knew most of us (if not all) felt initially a bit awkward about it. Lesson #2: "Good at drawing" does not a good artist make.

And to top it all off, some of us are good at certain classes, while some of us are good at other classes! I might feel a bit awkward flailing my charcoal around on newsprint to produce a negative space drawing of a bloody chair, but I feel great using Adobe Illustrator, perfecting my serifs in typography, and redrawing my blob over and over again with slight modifications. Others find this type of stuff tedious and frustrating, and would much rather fling paint at Mayfair paper, or draw the aforementioned chair. Yay! Lesson #3: Nobody's good at everything, but everybody's good at something.

So in the end, I shouldn't be so harsh on myself, and neither should you…on yourself, that is…or on me, come to think of it.

The cat is out of the bag

Apparently, my public demands that I write more. I didn't even know I had a public, but, well, there it is. The reason that I haven't been writing is very simple: I have lots of work to do. Schoolwork! Yup, I've just finished my 3rd week of class, and teachers have been giving us homework pretty much the whole time. So basically, I've been drawing and making sure that I get 8 hours of sleep for as long as I can (realistically, when things start to get really heavy, I will probably get less and less sleep.)

This blog post has actually been in progress for 2 weeks, so when I say "last week", please read "2 weeks ago", and so on:

Last week, the first week of class, one of my classmates asked myself and another classmate something along the lines of "so, are you guys getting to know your way around yet?" Naturally, having attended the very same school going on 12 years ago, I confessed the fact. There was this silence--short but very telling--where my classmate was obviously processing what I'd just said. She had a bit of a freak-out, where she kept exclaiming things like, "oh my GOD! You totally don't look 29!" and "Oh my GOD! No WAY!" She also just couldn't believe that she knew a 29 year old. She also said something about me being "sophisticated", which I thought was the icing on the cake. Then, she or the other classmate (I can't really remember) asked me "what it's like". Can you believe that? Being old is all relative, obviously... (Edit: The classmate in question will no doubt recognize herself if she reads this; I hope she won't misconstrue my tone as being condescending.)

In my drawing class this week, our teacher asked us to introduce ourselves, one by one. She wanted to know a bit about us, about our art background, and some general things like how we came to want to be graphic designers and such. This was my big coming-out party. "I actually was in the Creative Arts program in '99..." to this, even the teacher's eyes got big. I went on to briefly describe how I'd always been immersed in art, but never thought it was something you could make money at. I wanted to be a film animator; that was my thing. In those days, though, film animation was becoming increasingly more computer-driven, and I had absolutely no interest in that. Dropped out, got into music, held a job for 7 years, had an epiphany, and the rest is history.

A lot of the people in my class are coming straight from high school, but there's also an interesting number of them who are transferring from other programs in the same school, as well as people who have done university and decided that they would rather be graphic designers. I'm delighted to see such variety, and I'm actually looking forward to seeing what my classmates are capable of (but believe me, I'm feeling competitive, even this early-on.) The one other girl in my class who I thought might be older than me, as it turns out, is 2 years my junior. Naturally, we get on well together.

I don't want to make a big deal about my age, because I don't attribute much importance to it, but it does come up, and I thought it would be important to mention in a post. I won't be dwelling on it much in this blog, though, but if my public has any questions pertaining to that, I will gladly answer.

I've seen many other bloggers ask their public a question at the end of a post, but I hesitate to because if nobody answers my question, I'll feel like a bit of a tool. I guess it's worth a shot, though, so here goes:

What would your biggest fears be, in returning to school? If you already have gone back, what were your fears, and did you find them to be justified in the end?