#bc I was transferring my presence from dA to tumblr over time

[sergle]

I was digging up my old pixel art bc my friend was asking me abt game assets and wanted examples of stuff I made-- and man I kinda miss it!! tbh! I should do pixel art again on occasion. like tell me these aren’t still kinda cute

[clownmoontoon]

So wait you went to SCAD right? Did you ever graduate? Why did you drop animation? What was your major?

omgg lots of questions in one ask!! i’ll answer them in parts if you dont mind haha uwu/((also apologies if i come across bitter this was a tumultuous time u_u))((also under a cut bc it got long haha))

🌟 1st part:

yup yup i went to scad for two years (i think..it may have been 1 and some months idk its been a long time), and nope! i am a total art school drop out haha

i didnt even fully realize i was a drop out til this year bc for a while i always had the intention of going back as soon as my money situation was a bit more reliable. not to brag, but i did have quite a sizeable scholarship to attend, however the money was dispersed throughout my intended duration there so there was still a bit i had to come up w on my own. i could do it for a while, but wasnt able to keep it up so i was forced to take an extended leave until i could. the scad people were actually really gracious about it and did what they could to help me! but man private art school is E X P E N S I V Emy mom once described the price like i was going to become a doctor or a lawyer and there’s a running joke about scad being the “harvard of art”. idk about all that but the price tag sure fits haha

but when i realized i had improved a thousand times more out of art school than i ever did in it, i had no real drive to return at all. ((i’ll save my thousands of dollars for anime merch tyvm))

🌟 2nd part:

omg well to understand why i dropped animation you must understand that as a teenager i was a cocky little shit. bc i had never met anyone who could draw better than me, i assumed no one else could (spoiler alert quite a lot of people could and can draw better than me HAHA). even tho i had met w the teachers and staff i still felt pretty good about my skill, and even when i started attending scad i was one of the best in my class so i figured i was hot shit.

its worth mentioning my online presence at that time was little to nothing so i had no exposure to other artists until i had started actively using my da and tumblr about a month into my scad life. i had never even thought about the advantages of digital art vs traditional art, OR EVEN SEEN A DRAWING TABLET much less used one. WHICH WAS IRONICALLY SOMETHING THAT WAS NEVER BROUGHT UP WHEN PICKING MAJORS DESPITE ALL MY PORTFOLIO BEING DONE IN PENCIL.

poor young moon was under the impression that scad would teach her how to do animation u_u but (as i know now, and have mentioned in other posts) you enter art school with knowledge from the work youve already done, then you hone it into a finer style. you dont go to art school to learn animation, you go to art school to get better at animation.  if you wanna go to art school for animation you should already have animation samples in your portfolio hahai didnt know this, and no one felt the need to tell me this at the time which still kinda pisses me off tbh

well no thats not what pisses me off, forgive me for going on a bit of a tangent to explain but when i had talked to my advisor about classes and majors it was decided that staying home and taking what classes i could online and then transferring to campus to finish the rest was the most cost effective solution, convincing me that when i arrived on campus is when they would give me hands on lessons about animation.

it wasnt until much later that i realized w the knowledge i had at the time there was absolutely no way i could handle animation, and im quite certain they were banking on me realizing this and switching majors. which i did.

i went in majoring in animation and minoring in sequential art. i ended up swapping the two in the end, but never actually made it to any real animation classes.

and you may think “but moon when you did research on the school and what was needed for the portfolio didnt you see that you needed animation samples??”

and tbh i did, but when i brought this up as a concern they assured me my art was well enough to bypass that bit for the animation course, and bc i was so full of myself i figured they were right.

tbqh it wasnt until i left scad that realized i had so much more to learn in just about everthing i had the raw talent but my actual skill was bottom of the barrel to be a great artist you need both so after i left scad there was a time when i needed money for my mom so i took on a shit ton of comms (as some of you might remember) and bc i was FORCED to draw everyday for over a year i automatically improved leaps and bounds from where i started, and from where i was in art school.

comparing the art i do now to the shit i made then is like looking at two completely different people’s work haha

i have no real conclusion for this other than that i stick to what ive said before; art school wont make you a great artist, only hard work will do that ♡