During my time at Nelvana, as the Layout Supervisor, I looked at a lot of portfolios of people applying for a job. These people fell into three basic categories, 1) students from an animation school, 2) students from high school, and 3) professional artists, all wanting to get into the field of animation... "Where the BIG bucks are." they would usually say. And I would laugh to myself, "You poor deluded fool!"

Anyway, I'm digressing here. Many of the portfolios I looked at had these types of drawings in them, yes even from the animation school students and the "professional" artists. I'd spend hours going over their work, trying to explain to them what was wrong with it and why I couldn't hire them.

Then I started teaching at Sheridan College and behold, the same thing started happening all over again, but this time there were a lot more portfolios. The interesting thing was, the mistakes were all the same, and again, I'd spend hours trying to explain to the students, why their portfolio wasn't good enough to let them into the program.

Many times, (too many to count) these people just couldn't understand why their artwork was considered inadequate to let them in. Well, here, I want to try and let you in on it. You may be sitting there at your computer, looking at these drawings and thinking to yourself, "Holy Cow! These drawings are so bad. You mean they thought they were really good??" The unfortunate truth is that we blind ourselves to our own mistakes. We were the one's who spent hours drawing each and every line. You don't know the pain that the artist has to go through to get his "message" out. Every artist gets blinded to the quality of their own work. I look back on some of my drawings and think, "Ouch, that's a nasty looking drawing. How did that happen?" There are a number of reasons.

Lack of Training
Most people just don't have the proper training. Let's face it, high school art is not exactly the same as high school math. Oh, sure there's a curriculum but it's mostly, "cover as much area as you can in the limited time we have". Don't get me wrong here, I'm not slamming all high school art programs. There are some teachers who are doing an exceptional job but they can only do so much. Life drawing is one of the problems. You can't have a nude model in fromt of a bunch of young teenagers. So, they have to have clothes on or a blanket wrapped around them. Even with gymnastic tights, you can't really see the proper anatomy, therefore there's very little life drawing training. Perspective is one of my 'pet peeves'. The total lack of basic understanding of the simple principles of perspective in some student's work is enough to make you gag. Perspective is one of the foundational principles of drawing that must be understood when you get out of high school! That's all I have to say about that.

Lack of Time
Everyone has a life to live. Where do you find the time to just sit and draw? Especially when something might take you 4 or 5 hours to do. If you want to do it right, you need to do it all in one continious stretch. You can't break it up over a few days, you'll lose momentum and give up on it. Drawing takes time. Not just an individual drawing, but your whole lifetime of work. It takes time to grow and mature as an artist. Time to stretch you repetoire, your style(s), your ability to see and to translate that to an image for everyone else to see. I read once that Michelangelo, in his later life, wrote to his brother and said, (I'm paraphrasing here) "even at this late date in my life, I think I'm just starting to get good at what I do." This is Michelangelo... the Sistene Chapel guy... statue of 'David'... at the end of his life, "...I think I'm just starting to get good..." Sheesh!

Lack of Thinking
This is one of my favorites. I've turned this into my mantra, "Think when you draw". If you're not thinking about what you're doing at any given time, you're gonna make a mistake. The same is true with drawing. It's not your hand that's controlling your pencil, It's your brain, telling your hand what to do with the pencil. If your brain stops talking to your hand, it stops drawing. If you don't hink about what you're drawing, you're in trouble.

Lack of Trying
Some people give up on their work. You start out with good intentions and a great idea for a drawing. You may even "see it" in your mind, but then when it comes to drawing it out, it doesn't turn out quite the way you wanted it to. So, you give up on it. Sometimes, that's the best thing to do. No sense in "flogging a dead horse" (a rather gruesome saying, but true none-the-less). In a lot of cases with high school students, you can't just give up on a project when it's due tomorrow and you've already been working on it for three days. You're at a point where you can't start over so you just put in the minimum effort just to get it to a half descent point. There are also those goofy projects, (c'mon, you know which one's I'm talking about), research a well known artist and copy their style using a modern theme. Or, what about the "Dream Assignment", where you're supposed to take one of your dreams and do a visual interpretation of it. I... hated.... those.... projects!!! It's so hard to try when the assignment is so lame. Sadly, this also happens when you are actually working for a living. For some reason, Care Bears comes to my mind.

But enough of this wallowing in artistic self pity. Let's get on with the drawings.

Drawing the head as a circle doesn't really help much either.

This is someone who really doesn't know what they are doing. The art police should take this person's pencils away from them for their own safety as well as ours.

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