Elite Lakeside Sketch Outing.

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My Elite Animation Academy (8933 Conroy Windermere Rd, Orlando, FL) class always finds a way to get students sketching out in the community. On this balmy day we made our way to a small lake near the Academy. The goal was for students to sketch the scene and do drawings of the many ducks who call the lake home. We found a spot under a shady tree and got to work.

The ducks were on the far side of the lake but eventually they became curious and they swam towards us. I’m sure they figured that we must have food. We didn’t have any. The days lesson included looking for simple shapes. That is why the hedge across the lake became a perfect circle. I’m always fascinated by south paws. An artist who is a leftie has to twist their wrist in a unique way to see what they are drawing as they put lines on the page.

I can’t always find events for the students to draw although the high school sports field often offers games and practices to sketch. Being an artist is much like training as an athlete. Every day we need to exercise our eye to hand coordination. If one day is missed, the artist quickly becomes rusty. A former Disney colleague named Sam Ewing started a blog called Rusty Pliers and the title is starting to make sense. While working in the bustling studio we were tools with a defined purpose. When the studio closed, it became easy to become rusty. We had to re-invent ourselves to discover a new purpose for our skills. Part of what keeps me productive is to always look forward and never look back.

My Urban Sketching class gets students sketching everyday events.

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I have been teaching an Urban Sketching course at Elite Animation Academy, 8933 Conroy Windermere Rd, Orlando, FL.  My goal is to get kids out of the classroom and sketching in the community. I start by teaching a few drawing fundamentals to see where my students stand. When l feel they are ready, we head out to find subjects in the neighborhood. In this case, we went to Jeremiah’s Ice, 4750 The Grove Drive Windermere FL. The challenge with this scene was that the line is constantly moving. The advantage was that there was always a line. In class we had worked on a series of quick five minute poses which hopefully helped get them ready for sketching from life on location.

The student I put in the foreground of my sketch seemed very tentative in class, but once he started sketching on location he worked with a bold confident line. I missed the mark a bit in my sketch because the person at the front of the line looks like he is facing the wall rather than facing the woman taking his order. I am happy to have caught the mom’s gesture as she guided her son up to the window.

Yesterday, Terry and I went to see Inside Out at the West Orange Theater, 1575 Maguire Rd #109, Ocoee, FL. There are always campy local ads running right until show time. An ad for Elite Animation appeared on the big screen. I was pleasantly surprised to see myself in a quick 2 second shot within the promo. I’ve seen my drawings appear many times on the big screen but this was the only time I had ever appeared on a big screen. Terry was getting popcorn so she didn’t see my on screen debut. I can’t let it go to my head. Just in case, I’ll start writing an Oscar acceptance speech. Oh, and be sure to see Inside Out in theaters now. Pixar has hit another home run. I gave it 10 out of 10 Joys.

Sketching an Olympia Baseball practice.

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Elite Animation (8933 Conroy Windermere Rd, Orlando, FL), now has an Urban Sketching Course that I teach. I am always searching for interesting events and businesses to sketch in this little corner of Orlando. If I hear a crowd, I walk toward it. That happened on this sunny afternoon as I heard whoops and hollers coming from the baseball field. I walked my five or so intrepid Urban Sketchers over to watch the baseball practice from the grand stands.

This wasn’t a game, but a practice for the Olympia Baseball team. Although we were sketching from behind a chain link fence, I encouraged all the students to leave the fence out. In the outfield, players were doing sprints. There were a few batters, but mostly the pitcher and catcher worked solo.There were tarps over home plate, but they were later rolled up and removed. This wasn’t quite an event in my mind, but it was a great sketch opportunity for my students.

There’s a White Elephant in the room.

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Believe it or not, this is a sketch from December of 2014. I’m going through all the sketchbooks and finding sketches that I didn’t post yet. Terry and I went to the home of Wendy Wallenburg‘s friend Christine Billis right before Christmas. Everyone was encouraged to bring a rather quirky present for a White Elephant gift exchange. Of course there was plenty of food and drink before everyone settled in the living room for the exchange.

With a White Elephant gift exchange, you can pick a wrapped present, or you can steal a present that had already been opened. When it was my turn to pick, Terry encouraged me to steal the bottles of booze that had been someone Else’s pick. We hid the booze under a chair but soon enough it was swiped back. Every item that Terry got seemed to be swiped away, because she had to keep going up to take another turn.

Towards the end of the party, I was introduced to a young teen who loves to draw. I told her all about my new teaching gig at Elite Animation Academy. Hopefully I helped inspire her to pursue her dream. That’s what I love about my new job, I get to teach kids who are young enough to have never said to themselves “I can’t” or “I don’t know how.” Kids create with wild abandon.

Teaching Urban Sketching at China Garden.

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At Elite Animation Academy (8933 Conroy Windermere Rd, Orlando, FL), I have been teaching Urban Sketching to three very talented students. Megan has her own car, so she is in a perfect position to find places and events to fill her sketchbooks. Mathew absolutely loves the idea of going out into the community and sketching. He said, that he had waited his whole life for this chance. Samuel, who was usually accompanied by his father, tended to be uncertain when I suggested warm up sketch exercises in the class room. When we went out on location however, he was a natural. He would boldly sketch in a scene directly in ink, and I admired his approach.

On this day, we went to China Garden (8833 Conroy Windermere Rd, Orlando, FL) to practice cafe sketching. Megen and Samuel sat in a booth and Mathew joined me at a center table. In this class I had introduced everyone to watercolors and I let them go for a solid hour and a half as they focused on completing a sketch. At Elite we use office paper that has been three hole punched to fit on animation peg bars. This keeps the sheets of paper flush to each other so the animation stays in place. Unfortunately, office paper is very thin which makes it less than ideal for watercolor washes. I kept advising students to invest in nice sketchbooks with at least 100 pound paper. Samuel was the first to get his own set of Urban Sketching supplies while Mathew and Megan limped by on the office paper. I decided to do a sketch on the animation paper to see how it wrinkled.

I ordered a General Tao’s chicken as a late lunch to eat as I sketched. The order took forever to arrive. People sitting at a table next to us had been sitting there since our class arrived and they were grumbling about how long they had been waiting. The woman noticed Mathew sketching and she said, “Be sure to catch my good side.” Students had to borrow my water brushes which are a bit dried out it  hard to squeeze the water out of them.   I saw Megan squeezing her brush like she was trying to strangle it death. I gave her more water, which helped. She joked with me that she expected to see herself strangling the brush in my sketch. She is right, I missed a golden sketch opportunity there. I offered Mathew my fortune cookie, and he popped it into his mouth without cracking it open to check his fortune. He ate his fortune! I don’t know if he will ever know what it was.

I’m proud of each of these new Urban Sketchers. Megan came up with a strong composition in which the details in the figures she drew were offset by large open spaces of the booth backs. Samuel is like a focused machine when he works on location and Mathew has a strong eye for gesture and composition. If they each develop the habit of sketching daily, they will be grow in leaps and bounds outside the confines of a studio or classroom. Unfortunately there were no enrollments for the next 10 Urban Sketching classes, but that is just as well since I will be sketching in Turkey for three weeks as Terry and I explore this ancient country.

The Treat House Cafe and frozen yogurt shoppe is a cozy retreat for children and adults.

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Over the winter break, I have been teaching Urban Sketching workshops at Elite Animation Academy (8933 Conroy Windermere Road Orlando, FL). The classroom is located in a strip mall on the corner of Conroy Windermere Road and Apopka Vineland Road above a pizza shop. I have four students to start and my main objective is to get them out of the studio to sketch on location every day. Trish Eakin the owner of Treat House Cafe and frozen yogurt shoppe (8935 Conroy Windermere Road Orlando FL.) gave us a warm welcome and invited us to sketch in her shoppe which was right downstairs. She has a table set up in front where children can work on crafts projects. Trish explained, “My
dream when I built Treat House was that it would be a warm comfortable
place for students and artists to relax, study and create.”

The shoppe opened on Valentines Day in 2014, so it is a little less than a year old. Trish used to operate three locations of TCBY as a franchise.  One of those yogurt shops was right in Universal Studios. She had a staff of up to 13 people at the time to keep the shops operating. Unfortunately the shops couldn’t stay open since they couldn’t sell enough yogurt. She decided to create her own yogurt shop using her creativity and experience to come up with something new. She decorated the shoppe herself making it feel like a seaside rustic retreat. She put in the weathered woodwork and picked out furniture from antiques shops. Every choice reflects her personal rustic aesthetic. 


Trish’s Treat House is right across the street from the Chain of Lakes Middle School. When the school has it’s big pride day, she had the schools band perform on the back patio of her shoppe and 15% of all yogurt sales went to school programs. Her cozy shop allows her to feel much closer to her local community. I hope to return to sketch the next Pride Celebration.

When my class arrived, there was a family at the table and scissors and cut paper on the table made it clear that snow flakes had been created recently. Dozens of snowflakes were suspended from the ceiling. My student Ali took to sketching the shoppe with gusto. Steve, an Elite instructor sketched the vintage Coke machine giving it a forced perspective to make it look immense and ominous. On the first day we only focused on the line sketch and then on the second day, we used color on the same sketch. Trish worked behind the counter, likely crunching end of the year numbers. She later had to work on one of the yogurt machines, taking it apart and replacing what looked like the mixing blades. Since she is the only person in the shoppe, she has to be a Jack of all trades. Support local entrepreneurs, operating a small local shop is a challenge when huge chains undercut prices.

When our sketches were done, Trish took pictures of us all holding our work.

My resignation from Full Sail leaves me looking for new opportunities.

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Right before the winter break I resigned from Full Sail. There were no parties, no severance package, no confetti or golden watches. I simply turned over the Mac Book laptop computer,the parking pass and my lanyard and walked out the doors for the last time. The last class had only seven students, so I was able to give more one on one help when needed.

Starting Christmas week I will be teaching at Elite Animation Academy. The courses I will be offering are, the fundamentals of drawing, a life drawing class and an urban sketching class. I believe there are five to seven students signed up and I’m excited to start. Elite is at most a mile from my home, so I will be burning less gas. I plan to start riding my bike to the new job, so I’ll be getting more exercise. The new position at Elite will be a challenge because I have to come up with a whole new series of lesson plans. It is exciting to have the opportunity to inspire middle school and high school students to start carrying sketchbooks or digital tablets. Once you start sketching daily, it becomes an exciting lifestyle. Getting out and discovering the city by sketching has many rewards. My position at Elite is part time, so I will have more time to search for more freelance illustration assignments. It turns out that sketching weddings is an exciting alternative and if I can market it right, sketch tourism in Orlando could be another exiting opportunity.

I need to start looking for models for the life drawing class. Models will be clothed. I don’t need classically trained models. Instead I’ll be looking for talented people I have sketched in the past. I want to bring in creative individuals who would do what they usually do, be it playing an instrument, making a puppet or stretching before a dance. The possibilities are limitless, but for now there isn’t a budget so I will have to beg from friends. The only option I can offer now is an original sketch done by me during the class.

Elite Animation Academy Keeps the Tradition of Hand Drawn Animation Alive

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Elite Animation Academy (8933 Conroy Windermere Rd, Orlando, FL) is located only a few blocks away from my home. I’ve been asked to step in and substitute teach a couple of times and had a blast doing it. I was issued a black polo shirt with the Elite logo that made me feel like a member of the team from the start. The pay is actually better than what I make at Full Sail University so I was happy to step up to the plate.

The first day I interviewed there with Gladys West, I decided to stay and see another instructor, Chi Wang, at work. He was teaching a class on comic book character design. His laptop was open and connected to a large screen TV. Sketches of multiple comic book character heads filled the screen. Three students sketched diligently trying to emulate the heads. Basic proportions were covered and then the students sketched for the rest of the class. As the students worked, Chi, stood at the white board and cranked out an amazing sketch of a Transformer. Students were so involved in their own sketches that they didn’t glance up. I am always fascinated and inspired watching another artist work.

The first class I taught was on perspective. I covered the basics of 1 point, 2 point and 3 point perspective and I got the students involved in studying the perspective in the room around them. The room has vintage Disney Feature Animation Desks circling the central work area. Computers are found in a separate area. I had the students draw a single desk using the 3 principles of animation. Then I had them imagine the desk as a giant skyscraper in a city. I helped as we created intricate city blocks.

The second time I stopped in, I had just finished a huge rushed storyboard assignment, so I showed them the scripts, thumbnails and final storyboards I had created. It was a solid real world crash coarse on what it is like to be a professional artist. I then pitched them a simple story idea and they began doing thumbnails to built their story. I just had three students, but they impressed me with their ideas and execution. We batted around ideas and laughed at the possibilities. One student was working on his own story and I asked him to pitch the story to me. Once I knew what direction he was taking, I made suggestions on how he could make each character unique by giving them a shape that separated and defined them. I suggested he try to draw the male protagonist with nothing but straight lines and then I had him draw the female lead with nothing but curves. His work took an immediate leap.

At Full Sail there are 30 to 40 new students every month that take 10 classes and then move on.  There just isn’t enough time to turn so many students into animators. At Elite it was such a luxury to have a few students that were hungry to learn. Gladys is very aware of my daily sketch routine, and I appreciate that she considers me a valuable asset because of that. With the few classes I taught, I felt that I could truly inspire and  start these kids towards a lifetime of learning and sharing. That is what art is all about.

Elite Animation Academy

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Elite Animation Academy  (The Shoppes at Windermere 8933 Conroy-Windermere Road

Orlando, Fl above Costello’s Pizza ) is
an art and animation program designed for animation students. The
Academy is instructed by former Walt Disney Studios Florida  Animator
Paulo Alvarado, a graduate of the prestigious Ringling College of Art
and Design located in Sarasota, FL.  At  Elite Animation Academy we are “Developing Young Minds through the Art of Animation.“

Elite promises to 
provide young students the education and the tools necessary to create a portfolio
to enhance  animation skills and take it to the next level, should the student want to pursue a career in animation, graphic or game design.  Classes are after school, with convenient afternoon hours for parents
and students.  We focus on basic to intermediate levels with an emphasis
on history, theory, and sketch along with Animation exercises each week
after the topic.

The Elite Animation Academy classroom used to be The Art Room, which has moved to a new location. Elite Academy was founded in July of 2012 with the first classes taking place in the Ascension Church (4950 South Apopka Vineland Rd., Orlando FL). The interest and demand grew so fast that they realized they had to find a permanent home.

I found out about the opening day of the Academy when I bumped into Paulo and his wife while shopping at Publix Supermarket. Dominic Carola and his wife Love were at the opening along with many other former Disney Animation Artists. It was like a small reunion. A line of computers were under constant use by the kids who were there. They were using a basic drawing program and playing video games. One game was controlled with hand gestures. The computer’s camera must have sensed the hand movements. It was odd seeing kids swatting the air with their hands. Several former Disney Artists couldn’t resist doing a digital drawing of their own. One wife seemed quite enamored watching her husband sketch on the computer.

One artist told me about an animated short he is working on called “Crackerland” it is meant as a spoof of the old Florida down home attractions before the big theme parks took root. There was punch and cookies in the hall. Dominic’s children were middle school aged which immediately made me feel old. The last time I saw them they were babies.