Flip Flop Flying

Some days, I’ll sit down, want to do some drawing, look at the screen or a piece of paper, and end up just cursing at myself. After doing this creative stuff as a job for ten years now, I’m still no closer to ever feeling like a professional. I still feel like I’m gonna get found out. I do my best, I deliver on time, but I still don’t feel comfortable as an, ahem, artist. Which is why it felt a bit odd yesterday when I did a short talk about my stuff and a workshop with a small group of students as a design school here in Mexico City, called Centro. It’s a really lovely place. Seems like it’d be awesome to study there. There’s a really nice atmosphere.

It’s an odd feeling doing a talk and showing people your work, especially because most of the time when I do stuff, the only feedback I get is when people take the time to comment or email about it. It’s rare to see or hear people’s reactions. It can feel uncomfortable when you press play on an animation or something and watch people watching. But, the group was small, so I was kind of okay, and kind of enjoyed it. Especially the workshop part.

Sam and Manuel (the two fellas at Centro who I’ve been co-ordinating with) and I came up with a fairly simple plan to present the students with a template of a pixelly character, get them to take photographs of random people and use the templates to do drawings of them. The idea being that it could be nice to have them do something where size creates constraints, and ways of working within those constraints; a concept that can be applied to other types of artistic work.

The template we used was the same template I’ve been using for my pixelly baseball players. It’s a template that is very enjoyable to use, and since I’ve been here I’ve found myself drawing some famous Mexicans in that style.

Left to right: a street sweeper, Subcomandante Marcos, Blue Demon, Emiliano Zapata, Miguel Hidalgo, El Santo, Frida Kahlo, a shoeshine guy.

So, we got them started on that yesterday. Next week I’ll be going back to see their work, and their work is going to be included as a part of a small exhibition of my work within the school. A whole bunch of images from Flip Flop Flyin’ all printed on foam board. Looks lovely. I’ll be doing another talk, too, which, I believe is open to all students this time, in a bigger room, so I’ll get another shot at trying not to mumble and feel too uncomfortable talking about my stuff. Here’s a few photos of the exhibition.