I'm driven. For the longest time I denied this. I thought I just had a really strong desire to be an artist. However, looking back at the way I've gone about learning my craft, it's become apparent to me that I'm actually driven. Art isn't so much a whim - something cool to do while I wait for my real career to pop up - nor is it simply a desire to create, which can also be fleeting. No. Art or more to the point, the creation and appreciation of art, is a singular theme of my personality.

Since I was a child not yet out of diapers, I've been drawing. As a pre-teen I loved museums and would draw in every non-school related moment I had. Animation fast became an interest of mine - art that moves...I mean come on! As I grew older, people kept trying to convince me to do something more serious with my time. That art was a great side field but nothing to take seriously and nothing I would be taken seriously doing. Yet I never gave up. I went to cons, I asked questions, I picked up the books suggested by artists I respected who actually answered me. I traced - yes, traced...even though I knew how to draw I found breaking down the art of others to their basic forms was helpful in learning how to do just that.

  Time moved on and my interests fell back from simply comics to animation again and I began to study things like timing, path of action and key framing and the importance of silhouette. I soon discovered these things also applied to comics and  was over joyed at that.  Not content with simply drawing or inking, I began to learn coloring techniques first with inks and then with paint and later with computers.  I tried sculpting soap into various shapes and found I liked it (man did I end up with lots of tooth shaped soap sculpts) and learned I could do the same on the computer. So I learned about modeling and about sculpting digitally. Through conversations with fellow modelers, I learned there were things you had to be aware of if you were animating your models and so again, learned animation techniques so that my models could be better.  Now I find myself in a job where  I have to use everything I've learned - everything from comic craft to 3d animation and I wonder....

I wonder why so many people avoid learning a thing before doing it?  I wonder when did we become so impatient? I wonder how it's possible the children of today look at what we've done and seek to gain not the why of it but only the how? I sit back and wonder...was this how things were when the knowledge of the ancients were lost to us? I wonder if this is why in some ways we still don't understand how cultures so primitive could build things we still have trouble recreating? I wonder...are we, as a people doomed to periodic bouts of ignorance because we simply refuse to learn once the desire has left us and we discover we aren't driven to know or understand?

Yes, I wonder. I wonder and I worry.