Art Classes

I'm taking this figure oil painting class on Saturdays for the next five weeks with Hiuhan Liu, who is this incredible Chinese painter that (according to Maria) people pay hundreds of dollars just to watch paint.

So far we've had one class consisting of two 3-hour demos, and one painting class consisting of two 1.5-hour sketches and one 3-hour long pose. The former was brutally long, despite how valuable it was to be able to watch a master at work. The latter seemed to fly by, and I have nothing to show for it except for three somewhat crappy slops of color somewhat resembling a cowboy playing a banjo.

In any case, I've decided to start posting some of the artwork from these Saturday classes, as well as the charcoal sketches that I'm doing in the Tuesday night long pose. Hopefully I'll see some improvement over time; in particular, I am looking to hone in my understanding of color, which is woefully primitive and currently relies solely on heuristics.

 

1.5 hr sketch

 

1.5 hr sketch

 

3 hr sketch

Yeah, they're not very good. I've used oils before, but I've always had a lot of trouble with it. I found myself struggling a lot with knowing what colors I was seeing, as well as which colors to mix to achieve those colors. Over time I got a little bit better at understanding "okay the temperature here is slightly warmer, so I want to add a little bit more yellow/red," but I still couldn't quite hit the colors on the first try like a lot of the other people in the class could.

Not to mention, I have zero brush technique, so I found that I was mixing colors when I didn't want to, and my paint always had either too much or too little medium, making it either too dry or too drippy. *shrug* That's why we take the class, to learn!

 

3 hr sketch

Since I'm taking the painting class, I figured I should also practice my other basic skills w.r.t shape and value, so I decided to go to the long pose class tonight. This took wayyy longer than I thought it would (I thought I'd drop in for an hour or two), but overall I'm pretty happy with it (even though I didn't finish the hands). I think I got the likeness of the dude pretty well.

I also noticed there were some things that were coming back to me as I was drawing. In particular, I was remembering about how there is bounce light off the back side to make the darker core, which I tried to catch on the arm. Also, I haven't touched charcoal in a long time, and I just love the way it smears, and then you can just take it away with the eraser - it's really like painting in value only without the hue.

Something that I started doing when I went in later with the eraser was trying to add and subtract according to the actual planes of the surface. I normally have a lot of trouble with this, but I found that the further into the zone I got, the easier it was to think in those terms. I really like that style, and I'd like to practice it more. Next time I think I'll try drawing in the planes without first drawing in the linework.

Ode to the House of Books

I just finished reading The Hunger Games, so I went to the SF Public Library yesterday to pick up a new book. One of the great benefits of living in Hayes Valley is its proximity to the Civic Center, which I consider to be the most underrated center of awesomeness in the city. The Civic Center has just about every single type of establishment that you could visit and say (with a monocle and a heavy British accent), "Why, yes, I am cultured."

It's got the SF Public Library, the Asian Art Museum, the Symphony, the Opera House (also home of the SF Ballet), the Orpheum Theater (where I saw Mamma Mia... YES), the Bill Graham Auditorium (where I saw Lady Gaga... I'm really trying to build the cultured thing here...), and the ever lovely City Hall. There is also some random art project room which housed, up until recently, a strange installation of insulation pipes, styrofoam, and casually-strewn blue cellophane that would play the sound of a toilet flushing every time someone walked by. This wasn't particularly appealing, considering that the room was stationed right in the nook where all the homeless people slept and, hence, smelled like pee. But, then again, maybe the artist knew that and was using the homeless people as part of a "life in art" concept piece.

Anyway, I LOVE the SF Public Library. It's huge - five floors - and absolutely gorgeously designed with all these angular corners and beautiful spiraling shapes. Here's a picture I snuck in looking across to one of the interior study rooms on the fourth floor.

The first time I went to the SF Public Library, I wanted to pick up a copy of Ender's Game, which was not available. I ended up going home with:

1) Super Sad True Love Story. A book that Paul had suggested to me, which is a bizarre dystopian future satire about a sad middle-aged Jewish man in love with a young and bratty Korean girl. At times the tone felt very, what I call, "contemporary," which roughly translates to "trying too hard to be funny," but overall I found it to be an enjoyable book.

2) The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. This was a staple of my childhood, largely responsible for my completely unrealistic maritime fantasies of sailing the high seas on a pirate ship and climbing the main mast to cut away the sail before the ship crashes down in fiery inferno during a lightning storm. Well, it was this book and my obsession with one day meeting a giant squid and/or Kraken live and in person. I had to hover creepily in the children's section to pick this one out, but I felt I must have it because I recently reread Island of the Blue Dolphins while home for vacation and wanted to remember more stories that I loved as a kid. It took me three renewals to finish because a) I just didn't have time, b) I'm a slow reader, and c) dude, this book has a substantial amount of pages, like, legit reading.

3) Some book about American fiddling, complete with transcriptions of many little ditties in the American songbook. I had been wandering the library for a while and discovered that there was a whole music section, complete with row upon row of totally free sheet music that you could borrow and illegally photocopy. I had just ended up on the floor with a couple of huge volumes of Disney piano music, wishing that someone knew me well enough to buy me things like this without me having to ask, when I also inexplicably made friends with some old black dude who wanted to have a date with me "same time, same place" next weekend.

 

One day, my friend, we shall meet upon the stormy seas.

So, naturally, I knew that this visit would be just as riveting, and it did not disappoint. In fact, as soon as I entered, I was overtaken by that book smell. I don't know what it is about book smell, but it just engulfs your entire olfactory system and traps you in this semi-delirious state of wonder. I was literally wandering from floor to floor with my backpack straps hoisted in my hands in a permanent state of ponderment. No matter how stressful the rest of my day might be, being in a library can make me feel at total peace.

The thing that I realized is, part of the reason why the SF Public Library was so amazing, was that it simultaneously targeted memories for me that wove through my entire life. Being in elementary school and spending hours poring over the adventures of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle. Walking over to Summit Library from middle school, getting a slurpee at 7-11, and sitting on the front steps while Carmen told me about how her cousin used to sing a song that literally went like, "Boobies grow, boobies grow, period come, period come," with accompanying hand gestures (Aurora has huge boobs now, so I guess it worked). Digging through random historical novels for this and that random tidbit that I could quote in my English research paper, despite how little those facts and events meant at the time to kids who knew so little about life and the people who already lived it. Endless CTY summers bounding up and down the sterile hallways of the F&M lab buildings, brimming with adolescent love and gossip and summer freedom. Copying pages of scientific journals in the basements of the MIT libraries, trying to get the CopyTech card to work and sleep-deprived from too many last-minute psets. For some reason it reminded me of being in the Stata Center, too. Something about the lighting, I guess.

The similar theme that tied these memories together was the singular feeling that can only be described as, "here I will gain knowledge." If you think about it, libraries are a particularly wonderful gift that so few people utilize nowadays because there is such a thing as the internet. But anyone can go to the library. You don't have to have anything in this world (except for maybe clothing, I've never seen a naked person in a library), and you can just go inside a library and come out with something new. And there is nothing to worry about. In all those many memories is buried the very sacred feeling of being a student again, when you didn't have a job and didn't have to think about where your life was headed and didn't have to worry about if you were going to have babies before your ovaries dried up... when the only thing that ever mattered was putting information into your brain. This is the safest place I can be, because it is so laughably achievable. Sitting at home on my computer, I get the sensation that I'm supposed to be doing something, that I'm supposed to be using this information somehow, that maybe I'm wasting my time, and there is this nagging awareness of the world. In the library, there are only books and magic.

Having all these memories, I was made aware of another strange sensation. I realized how disjointed life is. Each section stands alone as a chapter written by a different hand. High school. College. Work. And I wonder sometimes, who am I today and what does this person have to do with who I was ten years ago? So much of what I have come to know as my life exists in this bubble. But as I spiraled slowly up the entire building, shuffling my feet and touching things here and there just because I could, I felt like I was going through my entire life, picking out pieces here and there, and wrapping myself in all those small moments that have brought me to this very point in time.

Anyway, it turns out there's a lovely calligraphy exhibit on the top floor with all sorts of calligraphic artwork, which was mostly beautiful except for one that kept cursing someone's "fuckery" in letters that looked like they came out of a really old Bible. In fact, there were so many great pieces it just made me think how difficult it really would be to make it as an artist in this world, and how odd it is that I know so many who have. I made my way back down the the main level and jotted down some reference numbers with those awesome timeless tiny pencils, and went looking for some books.

In the end, I checked out the book American Creation by Joseph Ellis, which is about the American Revolution and part of my eternal fantasy to become someone who is really into historical fiction (like my eternal fantasy to become a runner, the promise of this is somewhat questionable). I also got Tina Fey's Bossypants on audiobook, at Stephanie's suggestion. I've already listened to it while scourging the house and subsequently taking a bath, and I would agree that the audiobook is the way to go.

Brave New Beginnings

Brave is coming out this Friday, and even though it's different from the movie that most people are expecting to go in and see, it is an amazing film that most people will be glad to have seen. We watched it for the first time two weekends ago at the Brave wrap party, which was up at a wine castle in Calistoga. Yes, somebody decided that they didn't just want a winery, they needed a castle...

(photo from the interwebs)

We watched the movie in a custom-built outdoor theater, which proved to be the perfect 4D experience, complete with wind in your face while Merida rides through the woods and a couple of shooting stars. I seriously recommend watching this movie outdoors if possible.

There were all sorts of themed activities (archery, wood carving, scottish dancing, scotch tasting), themed food (turkey leg, roasted whole pigs, meat dumplings), and a dungeon dance party. Seriously, you walked down a series of tunnels into the cellar, past the torture room, and voila... full-on rave going on. Oh, and most of my male friends and coworkers wore kilts. AWESOME. I would post more photos, but according to HR, apparently it's a deep dark Pixar secret that we have fun sometimes.

 

Nadim and Dave at the villa, in my obligatory "let's take awkward prom photos" pics.

 

The girls' outfits for the night were very varied. Some women were wearing tartan cocktail dresses and shawls, some were in LARPing costumes, some just wore something lovely. I was opting for modern with a touch of medieval.

We had rented a villa in Calistoga to spend the night, and I fell asleep under the stars because the night was so warm. Needless to say, it was amazing.

This has been my life for the last three and a half years. It's hard to believe that much time has passed. I look back and see how much I've learned, and yet I don't feel like I've accomplished nearly as much as I would have liked. In many ways, things are awesome beyond belief and I'd be a fool to question them, but sometimes I still feel like I'm floundering, trying to find a greater meaning.

Certain <ahem> events of the past year have set me on a trajectory that I had never anticipated. I still find myself with a big question mark above my head, kind of like that game where you stick a note card to your forehead and ask, "Who am I?" The things that I had thought for so long defined me, I'm no longer sure if they are features or bugs. Lazy weekends powering through an entire TV series make me anxious now, like I'm wasting my time on pursuits that lead to nowhere. And I spend too much brain power analyzing people, trying to understand how and why people act and interact the way they do. Life is confusing.

So, in the spirit of Brave, I'm embracing the theme of the movie, "Change your fate."

I've been spending a lot of my extracurricular time on assorted interests of mine: dancing, learning languages, playing instruments. I like them because I'm good at them, at least to the extent that they provide me with some level of instant gratification. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, and dancing will always be my first and foremost love. However, I'm starting to feel like I need something more.

I keep seeing these projects at work and feeling like I want to tell my own stories, but I don't have the skill sets of some of my coworkers to be able to pull it off. Well, why not? Because I'm scared. Because it's hard, and I don't know where to start. Because it takes work and discipline. Because I want someone to push me along and root me on and help me when I've fallen down. But in life, you can only ever truly count on yourself.

I've never really started a project where I was unsure as to my ability to finish it. Even now, it's rather nondescript, and I don't even know what the project will be. I don't know where all this energy will lead me. But I know that I've been comfortable for too long, and I'm starting to sink into the black hole, the inertia. I'm certainly hoping that I'll walk along this path and then one day turn around and realize that all the questions have finally disappeared, and everything seems makes sense again. But even if they don't, I guess part of me just needs to know that I can challenge myself and become more of the person that I would like to be.

Ling & Rowling

This past week has been strange for me because I am currently in between assignments. I just finished up on crowds on Cars 2, and I'm waiting deployment in the 3D stereo rendering department. You would think that being between assignments would be the best thing ever. I certainly thought so. I had been on project after project since I started at Pixar, and even though some times were slower than others, I never had a moment where I felt like I could really work on my own personal projects and career development. And now, glorious free time, I was even able to go outside after lunch one day and read a book in the delightful weather we've been having while lying in the grass under a tree.

As the week went on, though, I went from relaxation to listlessness. It's like when you've been waking up early all week, and you think that it'll be great to finally sleep in on Saturday, except instead, you binge a little too hard on the zzz's and wake up in the afternoon with that horrible feeling of shame for having slept until the afternoon mixed with an even deeper feeling of shame for still being tired after said sleep. That's how I felt. On Friday evening I was exhausted, and I had no idea why because I had done very little all week outside of messing around a bit in Corel Painter and reading some photography websites.

My theory is that I need to start organizing deadlines for myself. One side effect of being someone who has not really been formally trained in any aspect of the movie pipeline but has experience in almost all of them is that I feel generally empowered enough to want to try a bunch of different things but not empowered enough to be able to harness any of them to innovate and create, which is really the goal, after all. And being someone who is easily distracted by the interwebs and such nonsense, the only real way to ensure that I'm learning what I want to learn is if I make myself a schedule of tangible goals with tangible deadlines.

So where am I going with this? Today I was watching Julie & Julia, courtesy of the free DVD library we have at work, and in addition to inspiring me to buy Julia Child's cookbook in an attempt to elevate my cooking a little bit from "put some shit in a pot with oil," it inspired me to jump start my week of not-lazing-about by embarking on a quest that I've been meaning to attack for the last few months now. You may not think of it as much of a quest when you hear it, but I have been playing Shadow of the Colossus, so you can trust me when I say this - I know what a quest is, and THIS IS A QUEST. I am attacking the pages of J.K. Rowling's great masterpiece, Harry Potter. Oh yes, Harry Potter, which I have read many times, but never IN CHINESE.

I was drawn to the idea because I love Harry Potter, and I always wanted to collect all the books in every language, since I am a hoarder and like having things on my shelf that come in collections. I was hoping every translation would have a different cover, and one day I would have read the series in every language that I even vaguely know or want to learn. And my shelf would look something like this:

Sadly, the Chinese book looks just like the English version, except that it's 95% characters that I don't know, and the words are super tiny so that I have to hold them up to my face to be able to see the strokes. Trying to read a book in Chinese when you have the Chinese literacy of a four year old can only really be described as masochistic. I've basically gone through one sentence, and already I'm breaking a sweat. Sweat induced by all the labor of flipping through the pages of the Chinese dictionary after every other word, because anyone who has ever used a Chinese dictionary knows that it is not as simple as knowing the alphabet in order.

The goal is to finish the book by the end of the year. I'm hoping it'll get exponentially easier and I'll be down to at least one in twenty words by the end. And then I'll finally know how to talk to people about Harry Potter, even if I still won't be able to read the whole menu at Chinese restaurants. Since, of course, that's what's really important anyway, right? ;P

2 Years!

It's been exactly two years since I started at Pixar.

When I arrived at work this morning, I tried to recreate the feeling of the very first day. I remember that I was afraid of being late or getting confused during all of the bus transfers, so I left extra early and arrived at 8am. Barely any people were in the atrium, and I walked around the deserted campus taking pictures of Luxo and just breathing in the California air. I had no idea how a movie was made, I had no real skills other than some programming knowledge and maybe some ninja matrix magic, and I didn't know anybody except for the guy who let me into the building. I think his name was Kevin, but I haven't really seen him since, though his friend that he introduced me to is in my yoga class now.

Well, right off the bat today, I kind of killed the mood by getting in at 10:15 am, a good two hours later than I arrived two years ago. Then I spent a good portion of today glued to my desk, cursing at Massive, and not really getting much sun at all. There's also been some... er... "life complications" that have been taking up a lot of my mental capacity, but I won't really get into that.

So, I was thinking that it wasn't really a great day to celebrate an anniversary. But, not every day is perfect. On the other hand, if I packed all of the perfect moments I've had over the last two years, they would overflow a day. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. Even just in the first three days of this week, I've gone to a totally awesome ballet class right in our own breathing room, had a long tea break with Roxanne out on the balcony in the warm totally-not-winter weather, went to a craaazy yoga session that involved these bizarre headstands where our heads were held up between two chairs, spent all lunchtime looking for cabins with Nancy for our epic 20+ person annual ski trip at the end of this month, and rocked out at my daily office dance party that I put on for myself after my officemate leaves and I grab a beer from the beer cooler out in the hallway of the chars pod. And maybe it didn't happen today, but every once in a while I just walk up to the front gates on a fresh early morning, and I get that feeling of giddiness all over again and wonder how on earth I ended up here. Whatever innocence I gave up, I traded for experience and knowledge and, most importantly, so many amazing friendships and days filled with laughter.

To top it off, we're going to get the chance to sign our names in the new cement out by the new building on Friday. A chance to be a permanent part of Pixar! Not to mention my two credits in Cars 2 for chars and crowds, and this character that I shaded just got revealed today:


It's also Chinese New Year, and my dad sent me an email saying how funny it was that I got hired for the first time on Christmas Day 2008, became a full-time employee two days after my birthday 2010, and now am celebrating two years at the company on Chinese New Year 2011. Well, in celebration, I'm going to start reading my new chinese Harry Potter book. Then, I'll finally be able to read chinese. Or at least all about chinese muggles and spells, I guess. 哈利波特!!! Yeah, awesome.

So speaking of Harry Potter... I promise this blog is not going to be all about beautiful men all the time, but I just couldn't resist posting this video of Darren Criss. Just because you work at Pixar doesn't mean that you can't fangirl, right? (If you are saying, "No, but the fact that you are 25 years old does," well... WHATEVER.)


While I was drooling at the screen, I yelled out, "OMG I WILL MAKE FINDING NEMO 2 FOR YOU DARREN!!!" Then I realized that I'm not high enough up to make that happen, and I got kinda sad. But, I'm here, and I'm learning, and who knows?

A reboot!

I've decided, as part of my New Year's resolutions, to reboot my Pixar blog. Basically, I'm still going to do my anal-retentive-write-everything-about-every-day journaling thing, but that will be private somewhere on my computer. This blog will be safe from that. This blog is going to be an actual blog, and I'll just update it from time to time when I want to actually say something for other people to hear.

In honor of rebooting things:

A beautiful, beautiful man. I cannot WAIT to see this movie.