In the middle of the workday last Wednesday, I was in a drawing class at the Fool being taught by the head of Pixar’s in-house University, Randy Nelson. He had us all drawing Woody from Toy Story. Here’s the original (left) and my version (right).
Woody from Toy Story
We drew the picture upside down and with only one panel showing at a time. This was to access our right-brain thinking, because any panel, viewed upside down, is not something the left-brain can discern, it’s just lines and shapes. But when we were done drawing each panel and turned the paper over, the end result was Woody, (or someone closely resembling Woody).
This exercise was part of a course that they teach at Pixar, not to the illustrators, but to the accountants or technicians. Pixar has an internal series of courses and credits resembling a full university that you take during business hours to expand your horizons.
The Motley Fool is working to put together our own in-house FoolU. I have taken courses on branding, analytics, and leadership and am in discussions to teach courses on process prioritization and visual thinking. I hope after Wednesday, they will add a continuation of drawing basics to the curriculum.
Nice job, Greg! This sounds really cool… and yours looks very, very close to the original. I have a Stitch drawing like this that I did one time when we were in Disney, in a very similar-type session (probably shorter). He’s not quite as close to the original, but still pretty impressive for someone like me who is not very good at getting what’s in my head to come out on paper… or symmetry- pretty bad at symmetry : )