It is Pile Time

Around my studio- piles. Piles of drawings, snippets of paper with ideas and thoughts- things to get back to at some point, piles of story board sequences, piles of reference materials...piles. The piles and their content is ever changing- some piles have moved to my phone (thank you Evernote!). It's how you can tell things have gotten busy again around here- piles.

Tristam is fascinated with the whole illustration process I have going on. It's pretty cool. I have 3-D models and sketches and reference pictures and for the first time he is putting together that what I do has a process- a discovery process and refinement process. That I'm using every tool I can think of to help illustrate an emotion, a point of time a setting etc. and that is not a one shot deal...it is many many revisions and it's not ready to be done until it's right - and that that is a really satisfying thing...Fred and I are both big on letting Tristam see us working and what that involves and that it is fun for us, but it does take time and commitment and it's not about working x amount of hours to make x amount of money, but that it's about doing what you do with passion, joy and focus and developing a level of skill where you can be paid for what you love doing. We hate for him to fall into this trap of not constantly reinventing and being passionate about things- because life is short and we all have things that we are drawn to that make us some alive- and we really owe ourselves and the world to keep seeking that out and effecting things. It isn't instant and it isn't easy, but it is worth it in the long run.

There was this great article in Fast Company magazine about what they called Generation Flux. Worth a read...