Because they're actually faster than me on Mondays.

My years of graduate school at the Animation program at UCLA are almost at an end. After my last film there, I get to do the fun thing and go look for employment. It's all pretty exciting, actually, and I'm looking forward to it. Hopefully with my time freed up (in the hiatus between school and employment) I'll be able to make more designs to enter into Threadless competitions - hooray!

I think that going to work is one of the weirdest, most creatively frustrating things ever. I get a lot of great ideas at work, and write or scribble them down, but I can't implement any of them into the next or final stages because, of course, I'm working. I have a feeling Threadless is a more student-heavy population than wage-slave population, but the principles are still the same.

This isn't to say that my job is entirely non-creative, it's just very, very limited at the moment. Who wants pie?

O.K., so mjoo's post kind of forced me to write this out. It's advice on how to overcome any sort of creative block from my life drawing teacher and ex Disney man, the great Glen Vilppu. To paraphrase, he said:

1. "Draw something. Anything. You can always draw something."

2. "Now draw the opposite of that."

3. "Now, (referring to drawing 2) draw the opposite of that."

The idea being that after about half an hour you'll have at least one idea - but probably more than that - that are pretty good if not fantastic. And you won't be stuck in an endless loop of the same two opposite drawings if you regard each new drawing differently and try to extrapolate a new "opposite" from there. I find this works well in all creative situations - art, writing, trying to unstick a zipper, whatever.

The high caffeine content in tea also helps.