Meet my inner editor:
At our family reunion last month, my brother,
Jonathan Hoffman, gave us a sculpting
class. This might not be your typical family reunion activity, but your
typical family doesn't include a Pixar shading artist. In his spare
time, he makes really cool stuff out of Sculpey, like this glow-in-the-dark octopus woman and this giant hairy warrior dude:
At the reunion we didn't have time to make a full sculpture, but Jon showed us how to make heads. He had all of these great sculpting tools, like rubber brushes and various things for cutting, scraping, and scratching.
Jon said it would be best to start out with some kind of alien creature, or else someone old and ugly. That way it would still look good even if it looked bad. With that in mind, I decided I wanted to see what my inner editor looked like. If I made her, I could put her on my desk and stare her down instead of having her stuck in my head, telling me I wasn't any good.
Yep, that's her all right. Old Sourface. My new reminder to stop listening to self-criticism and just write. So what does your inner editor look like?
Jon said it would be best to start out with some kind of alien creature, or else someone old and ugly. That way it would still look good even if it looked bad. With that in mind, I decided I wanted to see what my inner editor looked like. If I made her, I could put her on my desk and stare her down instead of having her stuck in my head, telling me I wasn't any good.
He has the. coolest. job. EVER!
ReplyDeleteAnd your inner editor is awesome. Love. :-)
Thanks, Kasey. I sure am proud of my youngest brother, who worked super hard to get into the animation program at BYU. He does have the coolest job ever.
ReplyDeleteWow! You did a fantastic job!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Kimberly! Great to see you here.
DeleteHa ha, talk about visualizing! Impressive - the brow ridges, broken nose, lazer-glare, and hairy chin. What great therapy for a writer to actually meet your I. E.! (Although I think I'll wait a few years more before I meet mine.) You and your brother are quite the artists, wow.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliment, Jonene. That means a lot from an artist like you.
DeleteLOL! I love it. And I love the concept of starting with something ugly so that even if it's bad, it's good. What a great reminder about how this is a journey...
ReplyDeletep.s. so impressed with both you and your brother!
Another lesson I learned from this exercise is to find just the right level of exaggeration. There's got to be a theatrical term for this, but I don't know what it is. When on stage, or on film, or even in a book, the emotions need a little bit of outlining so that the audience can recognize them. Why do we love cartoons? The emotions are so clear because of the simplicity and exaggeration of the lines that express them. When I made this face in a mirror and copied it exactly on my sculpture, the character didn't come through. I had to find the important, defining parts of the expression and make them bigger. Then the character popped out.
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