strop
Mar 5, 2018
Undergraduate / Drawing - my one constant love. SCAD statement of purpose (sequential art major) [2]
PROMPT: The statement should be no more than 500 words in length and should give an overview of the applicant's academic and personal experience, describing preparation for and commitment to further study at SCAD, as well as educational and professional goals and aspirations.
definitely still a WIP. start and ending feel rough; in general would love to know if there's anything extraneous that can be removed or if things need to be more focused.
Some starts are rougher than others. In high school, I battled depression with doodles in the margins of my math notebooks and clung to my sketchbook like a security blanket. But if you'd asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I would've come up blank-despite drawing being my one constant love.
Community college was a blessing I didn't know I needed. Suddenly, there were more art classes than I knew what to do with. I took what was required for my degree, and whatever else I could get my hands on-storyboarding, figure drawing, sculpture, painting. Some of them I took twice.
Two things changed at this point. First, I started reading more webcomics. Unlike in high school, their creators weren't anonymous internet behemoths. They were people my age, publishing their work and gushing about their stories just like I gushed about mine. Something that seemed so distant and dominated by big-name industry players was suddenly well within reach. The stories these people told were fresh and exciting; they made me remember what it was I loved about art on those days when I could hardly get myself to draw. I had to keep going, so that I could tell my stories too.
Signing up for storyboarding my first semester drove the idea home: there was no one right way to tell a story; no medium I had to restrict myself to. I fell in love the way I fell in love with comics, and was delighted to discover SCAD's sequential art program, where I could continue to draw nothing but.
My hope is that SCAD will not only help me improve as a sequential artist, but allow me to reach a place where I produce work not out of a sense of obligation, but because I enjoy it. At this point in my life, a relentless dissatisfaction with my art is one of my primary driving forces, and I want to find a way to leave that behind. There's nothing wrong with constantly striving for improvement, but not when it prevents you from being proud of what you've already achieved.
Future plans are wide-spread. I also want to produce animated features and short films that push the envelope of what 2D animation can do, the way films like Secret of Kells did. I feel like the mainstream animation industry abandoned 2D too soon, and I want to show people what it's capable of. And I want to make comics that do for people what so many webcomics did for me. I want to tell stories about mental illness, and queerness, (and monsters, and space pirates, and-) because there's nothing like finding a story about someone that is like you. A story that says, yes, you can have the adventure. You can tame the dragon and have the happy ending. And then you can go on and tell your story, too.
PROMPT: The statement should be no more than 500 words in length and should give an overview of the applicant's academic and personal experience, describing preparation for and commitment to further study at SCAD, as well as educational and professional goals and aspirations.
definitely still a WIP. start and ending feel rough; in general would love to know if there's anything extraneous that can be removed or if things need to be more focused.
Statement of a sequential artist
Some starts are rougher than others. In high school, I battled depression with doodles in the margins of my math notebooks and clung to my sketchbook like a security blanket. But if you'd asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I would've come up blank-despite drawing being my one constant love.
Community college was a blessing I didn't know I needed. Suddenly, there were more art classes than I knew what to do with. I took what was required for my degree, and whatever else I could get my hands on-storyboarding, figure drawing, sculpture, painting. Some of them I took twice.
Two things changed at this point. First, I started reading more webcomics. Unlike in high school, their creators weren't anonymous internet behemoths. They were people my age, publishing their work and gushing about their stories just like I gushed about mine. Something that seemed so distant and dominated by big-name industry players was suddenly well within reach. The stories these people told were fresh and exciting; they made me remember what it was I loved about art on those days when I could hardly get myself to draw. I had to keep going, so that I could tell my stories too.
Signing up for storyboarding my first semester drove the idea home: there was no one right way to tell a story; no medium I had to restrict myself to. I fell in love the way I fell in love with comics, and was delighted to discover SCAD's sequential art program, where I could continue to draw nothing but.
My hope is that SCAD will not only help me improve as a sequential artist, but allow me to reach a place where I produce work not out of a sense of obligation, but because I enjoy it. At this point in my life, a relentless dissatisfaction with my art is one of my primary driving forces, and I want to find a way to leave that behind. There's nothing wrong with constantly striving for improvement, but not when it prevents you from being proud of what you've already achieved.
Future plans are wide-spread. I also want to produce animated features and short films that push the envelope of what 2D animation can do, the way films like Secret of Kells did. I feel like the mainstream animation industry abandoned 2D too soon, and I want to show people what it's capable of. And I want to make comics that do for people what so many webcomics did for me. I want to tell stories about mental illness, and queerness, (and monsters, and space pirates, and-) because there's nothing like finding a story about someone that is like you. A story that says, yes, you can have the adventure. You can tame the dragon and have the happy ending. And then you can go on and tell your story, too.