An old journey

Hey lovely people of the world, I’m Charity.

I love all the expected things a gothic-leaning millennial loves; cats, magic, love songs, eyeliner, the colour black… but what I really, truly love, is art. Well, more specifically, making art. It’s a never-ending yearning, an insatiable drive, a thrilling romance, and a lifelong tragedy to love creating beautiful things. All I have ever wanted to do is paint things, make things, build something, design a thing. Solve problems visually. Create imagery that evokes emotion and intrigue. Capture the gesture of the in-between moments of life.

So I went to art school. Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. I fell in love on the first tour, the moment I stepped out of the car. The campus is a historical site, an old Tuberculosis ward. The buildings vary in architectural styles, changing with each new addition they built over the years, or reflecting the importance of the work performed in that specific building or the individual whose office it contained. There’s even a tunnel system underground, for when they needed to transport patients around the campus. The basement door of the main building opens to a ramp that takes you to the main level outside. It’s almost comically narrow for a ramp, until you remember that it was designed for a horse and carriage, or a wagon. And then you remember that the basement of this building was used as the morgue.

Given that the site is (now at least?) over 100 years old, it’s surrounded by massive trees and sprawling lawns with carefully curated gardens. Nature runs (almost) free here, and has created an idyllic spot that feels free from the constraints of modernised society. A place where creativity is welcomed. A place where it feels like magic still exists, and is just waiting for you to find it. A place where all people are welcomed, wanted, and cherished. It felt like home.

It took almost 3 years before I would return here. Life, a bad relationship, and an inability to describe what I truly wanted to do got in the way. Eventually, I figured out the word. “Illustration!” I said, after a back and forth of “fine art” and “figure painting” and “painting”. Illustration. Word pictures. Imagery that conveys a meaning, purpose, or idea. Narrative. A way to visually describe something. Visual storytelling.

I was hooked, it hit everything I thought I wanted: Beautiful paintings of people or characters, engaged in some activity, probably with magic, that conveyed some meaning or other idea. I had wild ideas, huge dreams, and unset goals.

Eventually the day came, and I was over the moon when I could finally return and start pursuing my passions. The awe and splendour and magic were exactly like the first time I visited, except now I actually got to come here every day and learn about the things I loved the most. It was intoxicating. I spent countless hours in the various studios, where I learned about design and composition, how to critique, how to apply an idea to a concept. How to simplify the idea into its most basic elements, and then build it back up again into something magnificent and meaningful. I carefully selected my classes to ensure the greatest outcome for my technical skills.

I fixated on anatomy courses and learned all I could about the superficial muscles of the body and the underlying bone structure. I spent so much time drawing the skeleton, little sections, and then the whole thing, various angles and poses. Then I overlayed the muscles on top until it was a defined “person” like you’d see on display at the Body Worlds exhibit. I figured out volume and mass, and how to incorporate gesture into the forms of the body.

I learned all about the nuances of colour, what it says and what it can mean. There was a section on colour psychology, and how certain colours can influence our behaviours or decision-making processes. Pair that with effective design and composition, and the secrets of advertising and why brands choose the imagery they do start to unravel.

Simultaneously, magic was added and taken away from my little reality. I felt like I understood all the little reasons why things are the way they are, and my personal, intimate relationship with art collided with the soulless world of entertainment media and design. I felt lost and disenfranchised. Over time, my desire to illustrate card art for Magic: The Gathering, splash art for League of Legends/Smite/DoTA, and illustrations for various mobile trading card games began to wane. It was a mix of being disinterested in competiting for a place in a male-dominated industry, changes in interests and hobbies, and my own growing knowledge about myself.

When I first started at RMCAD, I was so excited to take the Character Design class. I looked forward to it for almost three years, as it was a senior-level course. I thought it would be the course that unified everything: my knowledge of the human form, expertise in colour, and an unmatched eye for composition and design. After that, I’d be on my way to the Portfolio classes, where I would produce a series of character illustrations that I’d present in a larger-than-life display across several gallery walls on graduation day.

Character Design was the first class I received a B in. Well, actually, I was about to get a C but I redid a portion of one of the projects right before the grading cutoff. I struggled through every part of that class. I had little to no ideas for characters and no idea of my “target audience” for my style and content. I crashed face-first into the realisation; I’d spent all my time honing my technical skills that I neglected to develop the softer skills of networking and socialising, and super neglected the activity of consuming pop-culture entertainment. I didn’t know how to make characters, and my internal reference library lacked what all my peers seemed to have: lots of Dungeons and Dragons, role-playing games, anime, and the one thing that cemented my failure as an artist in the age of digital entertainment: original characters.

With no OCs I’d spent years carefully crafting in a D&D campaign (or other similar game), no touchpoints for relatable character development, and few friends to confide in about my troubles, I felt unbearably lost and hopeless. I didn’t know how to give a character interesting traits or qualities, answer questions about their likes, dislikes, preferences, and affinities, or give them a striking-yet-relatable backstory. I wanted to draw the most unrelatable, most majestic and awe-inspiring, yet socially distant subjects possible: deities, gods, angels, and devils.

I then encountered my second crippling realisation: I couldn’t draw the same thing twice. It was physically painful to my body and mind. I spent so. many. hours. trying to concept out a character and develop it, as per the rubric. Starting with silhouette sketches focused on shape language, developing a design, figuring out body types and poses, developing costuming and props, face shape, etc. etc…. It crushed me. Every new iteration was more painful than the last, and I didn’t have much to show for the amount of time I’d spent. Each line traced over my sketch, each outfit design over the same body-pose I drew, each adjustment of hair, outfit, jewellery … pushed me further and further away from the bright and colourful, illustration-filled future I imagined when I first step foot on campus.

I couldn’t do it. The process took away the one thing I discovered I needed: expression.

All the gesture and form I’d worked so hard to understand was brutally stripped away as I had to figure out every single detail of the character, in a static, lifeless pose (that is supposed to make it easier to ideate). Where was the painting? Where was the expression of self? Where was the expression of emotion? Where was the exploration of the abstracted idea as it is brought to a visual representation of itself?