My Embarrassing & Weird Old Art/Transcript


 * Rebecca Parham: I got up this morning and I said to myself, "You know what would do wonders for my self-esteem?" Showing over 300,000 people my absurdly embarrassing old art from animation school that I probably should have burned by now! Hello my geeks and peeps my explainers and entertainers my little uh lollies Rebecca Parham here many people asked me if I went to school for art and animation school I'm a part of the animated storytelling community on YouTube you think I went to school and actually you'd be right I did go to school for this general run-through of my college education go I graduated high school and went to a local private university to study theatre after an intense year of theater and music classes I realized I wanted to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming an animator so I then took a year of nothing but art classes built up a portfolio and got accepted into Ringling College of Art Design they're kind of known for their animation program kind of considered one the best in the world hmm now at Ringling at least while I was there you didn't just jump into animation the first day no no no no you had to take a whole bunch of weird art and design classes just to prepare you for the animation program and I'll be honest guys I don't think it was my art skills that got me accepted into that school I think it was my good grades and theatre experience because I was absolutely not the best drawer in my class I was actually one of the worst so that first year and a half of weird art classes I am more than certain that I made my fair share of terrible art cutting to the chase Ringling is in Florida and my family used to own a townhouse in Florida for business trips and sometimes my college stuff would end up there in between school years recently we sold that townhouse and the current owner sent me back some of my personal items that were left there so guess what came in the mail for me nearly four years after graduation a big old portfolio case filled with art from my first year and a half of animation school and guess what we're doing that's right we're gonna open up this bad boy and we're gonna try and embarrass the hell out of me knock the old ego down a few notches official content warning a lot of this artwork is from my figure drawing class which is the class that you draw nude models so if you think you're gonna be a little squeamish looking at some bad but tasteful drawings of nude models then go ahead and click off I'll see you in the next video and yes I did look up YouTube's Community Guidelines regarding the and it's all completely within the artistic / educational parameters we good and here it is this is the box that it was sent in I haven't opened it I haven't looked at this art I want to say in like 6 or 7 years I only have very vague memories of the art classes that I took at the time so this is gonna be as much of a surprise to me as it is to you guys let's get the sucker open so apparently I had two of them in there I don't remember two of them I only remembered the one on top but hey the more the merrier let's start with you so we're just gonna take whatever is on top first oh we're gonna start things off with some really awful figure drawing this was a homework assignment where you had to take a piece of artwork that already existed and tried to recreate it but had to have like naked humans in it although as you can clearly see I was a little shy at the time about drawing the bits we're moving on okay so let's just kind of start pulling off a little bunch at at once oh my gosh guys do you even recognize who this is that's that's goofy okay so we had a figure drawing class assignment in which we had to take a popular cartoon character and basically give them a skeleton like figure out what the skeleton underneath the body would look like and I just I just chose goofy I had to figure out how exactly that skull would work good lord this is awful but this is actually a very common practice that a lot of like animation artists do what I even get on that whew I got an A my teacher was very forgiving this is a skeleton thing of the Jesus Christ one that I did the one that I showed you earlier you see it's very important to understand the bone structure beneath the skin to really understand how to draw the human body okay I remember my teacher actually like really liking this one because I was really really awful in that class I was really terrible and the first time I ever got like any sort of praise from my teacher was I think on this one but just oh it why did she praise me this is so bad always had the trouble with the feet oh I remember this model she was really cool she brought her dog with her one day to class and the dog was just so well behaved and so well trained that they let the dog sit in her lap while we did a gesture of her so that's really cool know what in the world are these thing this was the type of assignment where they gave you like a whole bunch of words and you had to figure out the line or the the pattern or the design that best represents that word angry yeah okay claw marks all right here's a winner right here what does fat look like the 20 year old Becca mm-hmm looks like the eyesore on board like everybody who's watching this video does that represent how you guys are feeling right now this looks like a really weird game of Mahjong or something happy the feeling Millennials never feel do you feel that way guys no good run track but in all seriousness this is actually a really good exercise because it helps you better visualize certain descriptive words and really bolsters your creativity a little bit block people because we're all just a bunch of blocks put together oh yeah this girl this was Halloween Day and she was in costume so we did all of this in her costume and I think what her costume was it was like a half woman and a half guy and she just happened to have like mostly the guys tied turned towards me oh my gosh guys no mouth this is where it all started and this is what your hands look like when you're in a figure drawing class and here's your nightmare fuel for the rest of your days this was actually a similar exercise to giving a cartoon character a skeleton only I think this was Stewie Griffin and I had to give him muscles but like why did I give him like a like more realistic nose and more realistic ellipse I don't understand that but this is another one of those learning exercises where you had to know all of the muscles of the human body so you can better draw the human body so just important stuff even if it is really creepy oh no wait this is the one this is the one that I got like a lot of a lot of praise for my teacher on this is the one where I finally thought hey maybe I can do this maybe I'm not so awful and this one's better than most it's not it's not good but it's better than most random poses that prove I did not belong at this school yay more really bad gestures more really bad gestures yes all completely necessary to being a better artist and animator okay if you guys thought that Stewie Griffin thing was nightmare fuel you ain't seen nothing yet because the piece de resistance what was this um I think what I ever gave it like a leaf what Rebecca you draw you draw the breast but you don't draw the junk okay oh my gosh but I remember this to be was another exercise and like muscles and skin and we had to take somebody else's cartoon character that they chose for the previous assignments and like draw a finished cartoon character over it and I think this was a picture of Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory and I don't know what I made her into like are these like supposed to be dreadlocks but why is one forearm so much bigger than the other and what do these like frog fingers in the Frog toes I have no idea what I was thinking this is super creepy I never want to see this again so now we have this bad boy and he was heavy all right what have we got here look these are big books in oh we're gonna pull out something colorful what so I have a business of Art and Design minor and I had to take a lot of business classes and one of my favorite teachers was the teacher of this class and she wanted us to do an art project of like what life means to us and I said well life is like a balancing act look at that derpy dopey expression I like the concept because I still believe that life is nothing but a balancing act but still this this this never needs again newsprint here we go yet another example of the failures okay so this is the point where I found two whole sketch pads filled with nothing but bad drawings just look at how many I'm flipping through right now there is over a hundred of them and not a single one is good enough to be in a portfolio I want to recall an old Walt Stanchfield quote that everybody needs to remember don't be afraid to make a mistake we all have 10,000 bad drawings in us the sooner we get them out the better I'd say that number is higher look I was in one of America's best animation school programs and I was still getting those bad drawings out to this day I am still getting them out this is what getting better looks like it is mountains and mountains of ugly unusable drawings out of a hundred you may have a couple that are okay every professional artist out there has their own mountain range of bad drawings I get asked for art and animation tips all the time and this is really the most important insight that I can give you practice practice more practice even more than that practice until you fall asleep face-first into your sketchbook because that is what you are supposed to do in order to get better every bad drawing is a tiny baby step closer to where you want to be okay I know I've been ragging on past Becca pretty hard throughout this entire video but back then she was really trying her best I was really trying my best fighting my way through an extraordinarily hard college program surrounded by people who were far better than me the very definition of intimidating I guess my point in all of this is if a socially awkward theater geek with low self-esteem who was in way over her head can do it then chances are so can you just takes a lot of passion and self discipline and determination and maybe some iron-willed stubbornness at times keep drawing all my new artists out there and thank you so much for tuning in but now I got a tune out bye hey guys editor Becca here one last thing thank you so much to everybody who donated to the victims of Hurricane Harvey your kindness and love is such an inspiration right now there's still so much left to be done for those affected so if you'd still like to I'm gonna leave charities in the description below once again thank you everyone I really truly adore all of you.