You are dedicated to your craft. You have spent countless hours honing your skills. You have a boundless curiosity for the underlying theories and structure of communicating ideas. You are the artist who finds the connections between your medium and other communications media. You are the artist who relishes in a setback; after all, it's a new opportunity to learn and grow. Inspiration is more than a haphazard mode of thought requiring constant nurturing: it is your natural state of mind.
Lean Into Art is where you go when you're ready to push yourself as an artist in new ways. As a place to learn communication arts online it combines an art-journaling approach, the best of live and time-shifted classes, and a recognition system that encourages students to finish projects, give feedback, even participate in teaching.
It's a big art challenge - that's why we put the enticing warning in the name. You have to lean into it.
LIA Quests, a new interactive creative challenge and feature of the LIA Cast. Much like our Curveball segment, we throw out a small challenge at each other (and you, the Leaner) to get our creative motors running.
See the latest Quest on the Quests page and take these mini-challenges with us here and on Twitter using the hashtag #liaquest. Link to your work to complete the quest, link to other examples to share powerups.
Now that we've reflections and plans for 2013, there's nothing for it but to dive in and complete those goals, right? Easy! But time and again we find ourselves falling short of our goals, for a variety of reasons:
We sit down to do the work and don’t know where to begin
We have the desire, but not the ideas
Nothing we throw down on the page seems very good-the work is happening laboriously, not joyfully
We don’t have any “inspiration”
So this week we dive into some thoughts on the value of "limbering up." How does the way we feel about the work change when we take a few moments to incorporate a warm-up exercise? How can we spin ourselves up to the workday and keep that energy going throughout a project? How might they simultaneously remove friction from Mind, Body, Spirit, Skill, and Awareness?
We also launch a new feature with this episode: The Lean Into Art Quests! Scroll down for more information about some new interactive challenges we're all going to take on together.
Consider a sound effect for any or all of the following:
A rusty old tractor starting up
An air conditioner in use
Someone making an espresso
There are 3 ways to participate in the quest:
Heroic Challenge: Create the sound effect on paper or digitally. Black and white or color.
Items of Excellence: You may also find examples by others that demonstrate good mechanical sound designs.
Link Power-Ups: Provide a link to an article or tutorial that will help others in their quest.
You can share your questing materials on Twitter or Google+ with the #liaquest1 and #liaquest tags. Finish your quest by January 16, 2013 to have it discussed on the next episode!
We'll even start you off with the first Link Power-Up: Check out LIA Cast 14 for our episode on designing sound effects!
As 2012 comes to a close, we take the opportunity to talk about a subject that is on a lot of people's minds during this time of year. As some of us make resolutions for the future while reflecting on accomplishments and failures of the past year, we think it might be a good idea to be intentional about this kind of reflection and planning. But what kind of thinking is most useful when planning and reflecting? What resources are out there for us to use as a starting point?
Spotlight on Jerzy's FTAM! workshop, only $40 for an in-depth session on the fundamentals of sound design and how to create sound elements in vector format.
And Krishna Sadasivam's Creating Crazy Characters workshop, another 4 hours of video that will walk you through how to create characters based on shape and how understanding shapes helps us create dynamic characters.
Having just finished a season of creative challenges, and as we approach the season of resolutions and reflections, this is an opportunity to gear up on new tools and materials to assist us in our endeavors.
We're back to live streaming video for the LIA Cast, and to celebrate we have a talk around the topic of visual pacing. How do we create rhythms on the page? How does shape, size, line, color, and negative space contribute to the pace at which the reader or viewer interprets the image?
Returning to our 10,000 Ft Up/On The Ground format, we explore the following concepts:
Negative Space = Positive Time
Line, Color, and Size = Relative Time
Image Density = Quantum Mechanics
Followed by a bevy of works to study in exploring this subject for yourself!
Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 1:00PM 
