When I was growing up we had no money.

I don't mean in the common sense that "times they were tough" I mean we didn't have enough to live on. I spent most of my life watching my mom two or three jobs a day to pay for the crappy one-bedroom apartment we were trapped in. She'd come in for a few hours of sleep and lie down on the floor. We couldn't even afford food. We had $30 a week to survive. If I was hungry I needed to deal with it.

Today, this haunts every part of my daily life. I turn lights off of rooms obsessively and I find every dime I can for saving. And I can't eat more than two meals a day without feeling stuffed. In many ways, I can imagine how it would feel like growing up in the depression. The only thing I had back then was free time and the prayer of talent at anything - I needed a way out.

My mom must've found Animation by Preston Blair by accident. The garish color cover and oversize format were clues to me that it was something special. I studied the drawings all the time and tried my best to match Blair's style. I learned so much about cartooning from that book that I decided it was what I wanted to do when I grew up. Blair convinced me in 40 pages that "character" animation was worth a 5-year old's time. Later on I heard that it was the inspiration for many, many other cartoonists and animators as well.

Oh, and I noticed that the ASIFA - the Hollywood Animation Archive Project had released most of the book free online. Enjoy!

I'm going to be tossing up a PDF version of this into the library sometime this week. I photographed and retouched my old copy but these are so much cleaner!

-Josh