The weeks are going by fast and it’s quite a challenge to keep up. As I’m writing this, I’m already in the middle of week 4 at AnimationMentor!
When class started, there was a lot of excitement. I mean, there still is, but as you get familiar with the weekly rhythm of watching a lecture, going to Q&A and working on your assignment, things start to settle down a bit. You get a bit overwhelmed by tons of information and I find myself writing down pages and pages worth of notes from the lectures and Q&A’s! It’s all very interesting stuff. My mentor is Anthony Wong, who has a lot of experience as an animator. He worked at Disney and is now at Pixar working on the upcoming Cars 2!
Luckily, the difficulty of the assignments ramp up nice and slowely… In week 3, I submitted my first animation assignment: A bouncing (soccer) ball.

We are also encouraged to go out into the world and sketch people doing everyday things. It’s all about expressing emotions, relationships etc. just using poses. This is a personal challenge for me, because I’m not used to taking a sketch book with me all the time and drawing from life. Usually I would take photos as a reference. However, one valuable lesson I learned was that if you do that, you lose something because another artist (who took the picture) already made artistic decisions. Here are some of my sketches…
Week 2:


Week 3:


Isn’t it great that I have so many pics that I can show here?
I’m told that in that one week, I already improved in this area, which makes me happy and is a great motivation to push further!
It’s still hard for me to start early with the assignments in order to get some more feedback throughout the week. I know that time management is still an issue that I have to work on. Being in this school isn’t „just“ about animation; I knew even before I submitted my application that it will be the challenge of becoming a professional artist and to grow as a person. To become someone who isn’t afraid of asking for help, giving constructive feedback and working on their own weaknesses. It sounds like something that can be taken for granted, but I know from past experiences that it can actually be very hard to do these things!
For years I’ve dreamed of becoming a real artist… Now this is actually happening and it feels very good! I even started going to a real life drawing course for the first time and as you know, I’ve been oil painting for some weeks now. And in the first week of May I’ll be attending FMX in Stuttgart!
Now, I could go on writing about my experiences at this school forever, but this will have to do for now