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Picture taken many years ago by Grace Roselli.

The worst thing that an artist can do is have only one style, one type of emotion, because let’s say if you only do romance films and there aren’t any romance films being made in your area, you’re out of luck, you can’t find a job for three months, six months at a time. To be as versatile as you can, especially if you can switch from live action to animation to fine art, you can basically cover all the bases.

I personally wouldn’t want to encourage people to just work on other people’s films for the rest of their lives, or work on other people’s projects, because I think that every artist has something to say, and should allow themselves to present that to the world in some small way or some large way. So any class that I teach, sculpture, figure drawing, animation, storyboards, painting, whatever it is, I’m constantly talking about how can they take this thing that we’re creating and take it to the next level so that we can actually use this to speak through, to come up with their own ideas.

I think for the mental health of any artist, you have to be expressing yourself in some way. If not, you’re not really an artist, you are more of a craftsperson. If you are truly an artist deep down and you are not expressing yourself, you’re going to feel some kind of lacking, that something is missing in your life. Whatever fancy art job that you have, if you’re not expressing yourself, you are going to be very unhappy eventually in that job. So I encourage my students who graduate and who are working at these big studios to spend at least a couple of hours a week on something that they own, something that’s personal to them.