March 1996..........wooo!!!!!!!!

New year!!! Every budday! Every budday!! So here is a 10 yr old drawing from the first sketchbook I ever kept and finished. It's from xmas 95'-March 96' Like a lot of people who like to draw, I'd been drawing since I could hold a pencil, (or keep me from running around and having asthma attacks) but I didn't start keeping a lot of them in book form until sophomore year in highschool. It does help being able to look back and see how much was learned and how much there is left to learn. Sketchbooks are great, they are like little file organizers for your brain, and would probably be beneficial to any artist who kept one, which a lot do!
So I officially feel old this year! Yay!!! Summer 1996 I went to a thing called California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA, renamed recently to Innerspark). They take out of state students also, so that was why I was able to go. At the time, the teachers there for animation were Christine Panushka (who now teaches at USC, sweet, inspirational gal!), Gary Shwartz, Ruth Hayes, Corny Cole, and Leo Hobaica. It was a neat program where young aspiring artists could meet other young aspiring artists from around the country, take crash courses in animation, including it's history and many forms, tour studios and meet professionals, guest speakers, and meet artists of different discipline. Art college was a bit different, we had so much work to do, it was hard to mingle with students in different programs. I'm still friends with many of the people I met there. Some are married with cute little babies, others have found different careers that float their boat, and some have blogs too. So 1996 was a cool year for highschool students who had been bored out of their mind knowing what they wanted to do, and finally knowing what needed to be done to get there. And it'll never be done, there are so many cool things to see or do. Yup. Down below is a schedule from the first week of CSSSA 97' (I went for one more summer). They had us go to a screening of Renee Laloux's films "Fantastic Planet" and one about some space time travelers. He was there and told us the difficulties of getting the movies made. I don't remember going to the Leonard Nemoy thing, sadly, I was probably WORKING on an assignment or something. Other than CSSSA, 1996 was spent drawing, jogging, and playing Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 3. Sweet.