My Embarrassing & Weird Old Art

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 oodle lollies, Rebecca Parham here. Many people ask me if I went to school for art and animation. Pfft, school? I'm a part of the animated storytelling community on YouTube. You think I went to school? 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 theater. 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 and Design. They're kind of known for their animation program. Kind of considered one of the best in the world. Ahem. Now, at Ringling, at least while I was there, you didn't just jump into animation the first day. No-ho-ho, 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 theater 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 this, and it's all completely within the artistic slash 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 six or seven 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 this sucker open! So apparently I had two of them in there. I don't remember two of them, I only remember 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 try to recreate it, but it 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 a whole bunch out 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'd I even get on that? Ooh, I got an A! My teacher was very forgiving. Now, 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- ugh, it- Why did she praise me? This is so bad! Always have 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. Now, what in the world are these things? 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 pattern or the design that best represents that word. Angry. Ugh. Yeah, okay. Claw marks. Rawr! Oh, here's a winner right here. What does fat look like to 20-year-old Becca? Looks like the eye of Sauron. Bored. 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, we're on 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 guy side 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 lips? 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 praise from my teacher on. This is the one where I finally thought, hey, maybe I can do this, maybe I'm not so awful. Yeah, this one's better than most. It's not good, but it's better than most. Ah, random poses that prove I did not belong at this school, yay. More really bad gestures, more really bad gestures. P.S., 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, look, I even gave it, like, a leaf. What? Rebecca, you draw the breast, but you don't draw the junk. Okay, oh, my gosh. What I remember this to be was another exercise in, 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 Deedee from Dexter's Laboratory, and I don't know what I made her into. Like, are these, like, supposed to be dreadlocks? What, and why is one forearm so much bigger than the other? And what's with these, like, frog fingers and 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? Whoop, these are big books, and ooh, we're going to 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 never needs to see the light of day 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 gotta 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 donate, I'm gonna leave charities in the description below. Once again, thank you everyone, I really truly adore all of you.