By Mary Johnson
JANN Vice President
June 2021 saw Rohan Goldsmith as JANN’s CTOM. He has a deep background as a traditional artist, painter and teacher who started animation late in life. He is very enthusiastic about his animation work and works at improving his skills early everyday. He was recently interviewed by our Fundraiser and Financial Controller, Kevin Jackson.
To be a part of our creative of the month, we highlight persons who constantly practice and share their progress on our FB page and we love and appreciate their hard work and dedication to the craft and want to find out more about them.
Rohan has shared a lot of his work on our facebook group Jamaica Animation Nation, doing frame by frame animations and hand drawn animations. He is a graduate of Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. He teaches art at Ardenne High and is a Lecturer at Drawing for Animation UWI Carimac.
Rohan started drawing from a very young age drawing superman from the back of the cereal box by copying and liked how it looked and continued. Due to his constant growth in drawing, he stood out in his classes. Growing up he attended Kingston College which had a really good art department. This allowed him to get a lot of drawing practice which propelled him into Edna Manley.
He does a lot of freelancing every now and then. It doesn’t pay the bills but it supplements his income. He is very addicted to drawing as he does this every day. If he misses days of no drawing, he feels like a cigarette addict that needs to take that “draw” to function. He has to quickly draw to fill the crave he has for creating artwork.
Over the years he has illustrated book covers and does lots of paintings. He states that his friend Winston Roberts used to collect his artwork before he passed away several years ago. This felt pretty cool having someone be a collector of his paintings. He points out that traditional painting has not been so “alive” since digital art came on the scene. It has been years since he used a regular pen, pencil and paper to draw and does mostly digital art.
He finds that he draws while in meetings of his environment and all who are in the meeting which allows time to pass quickly which sometimes gets him into trouble.
His first commission was in high school. He was in 9th or 10th grade where his mother asked him to paint a bird. Once his painting was completed, his mother took it to her work place and from then he received many requests to paint birds. He didn’t like painting the same thing twice, but it was high school and did as his clients wanted and felt good earning while in school.
Initially his mother wasn’t his biggest supporter for being an artist as she believed it would make her son starve for a living. But at age six he always wanted to become an artist. His father encouraged him to continue nurturing his artistic talent. Over time, once his mother saw how good her son was, she started supporting him.
Rohan advises that people are not as knowledgeable about art as they should be. Which gives the notion that if you want to be an artist, painter etc, you will starve. “Everything is art and it is everywhere.”
Four to five years ago one of his sons did the animation course at UWI. He asked his son to teach him what he learnt in his animation classes but didn’t follow through. But after Rohan started teaching drawing at UWI he decided to learn animation as well. He started with Autodesk Sketchbook. He used flipbook which has an animation feature in it. He is now into Clip Studio Paint.
For his process to animate a figure, he draws from references. He likes when his drawings look “credible”. He likes to check that things are into place making his drawing more accurate and not think they are.
When animating he usually makes a recording of something, so he can see all steps and slow the video down to capture it better or look at a video. When drawing a bottle he looked at it and drew it,then turned it around and drew it at each turn. This makes it look convincing. The models he uses are recordings. His art consistency in his animation was commendable by Kevin when showing his figure animations.
One of his figure drawing animations consists of 30 frames and he has to paint each frame. He ensures consistency by waking up at 2 o’clock every morning which is quieter for him to animate. He draws pretty quickly. He practices speed drawing which is like doing a work out. He equates drawing like a work out when going to the gym, only difference it is for drawing.
His favourite technique is hatching and likes to draw with a pen. He always tells his students not to draw with a pencil, but to draw with a pen as it forces you to make fewer mistakes. As the mind tells itself “I can't erase” so he makes fewer mistakes.
He loves cartoons and definitely wants to try working on a production and has recently gotten into anime. Initially he was into Justice League and other cartoons similar to Justice League. He remembers telling son that some animations felt wrong based on the drawing as it wasn’t realistic. He is now shedding that point of view.
While watching the Invincible, the animation design was “just heaven.” He explains it had the right perspective and proportion and would like to get to that level.
When asked if he would like to work on a production or someone else's animation or write his own materials. He advised not to put oneself in a box, and say this is what I want to do and nothing else. He would like to do some of his own creative works. He has three sons and all three are really good artists. One is an animator and another an illustrator. He played with the idea of working on a production with his sons. All three have collaborated on a book by Naketa West named “Dance of Love And Other Verses”. Micah worked on the cover, while Rohan and his son Brandon worked on the illustrations inside the book. Another book they worked on was “Nut Ford High Vote,” where he worked on the layout, rendering, line art and one of his sons’ worked on the colouring. He worked on “Leap into History - A Level One Textbook” by Kimberley Campbell and Tamika Henry by himself.
Over the years Rohan has had problems with printing organizations and not necessarily the clients. He notes that every printer is different and each has their own idea how things are done and criteria is different. For example the Gleaner needed something done a particular way different from what the client wanted. Formats differ from printery to printery. He says that Trinidad printed better quality products back in the day.
What he suggests is that they start teaching artists from high school how printing works so they can understand it better.
He envies line accuracy and smoothness as his lines are very sketchy. He also loves comics, Spiderman and understanding the story and background of each character to be able to relate them to friends.
He notes that the Invincible cartoon drawing was eye catching for him. Once the drawing looks good he will watch an animation even if the storyline is crappy. It’s better though when the storyline is good. He thought “Invincible” was the complete package as the storyline was realistic. Rohan adds that before, the animations were very sanitized, not real to life. The characters didn’t get hurt, rarely. Invincible has pulled away the veil, noting, this is a real person. He adds the storyline is not completely new, but is more realistic.
For artists who want to take part in animation, he advised first to love drawing. As there will be points in time when it becomes frustrating with drawing and would need to start over multiple times. But if you love to draw you will shake it off and move ahead.
Second is to be observant. Constantly observe your environment, see who the light falls on the trees and surrounding environment, the colours, lines, texture. You need to be an observant person. You have to love it so much that it is constantly talking at the back of your mind how the light falls, where to put the vanishing points etc. Once you get these two points, learning the drawing application software becomes secondary.
He adds that if you are not constantly upping your skills, you will not grow in the field. You can look at another person's work and say, hey I didn’t know that. There is always something new to learn. You should never get to the point where you figure you know everything.
Until recently drawing teeth at one point in his life was dreadful. He advised the person when giving him photos of portraits to ensure the mouth is closed. When he was younger his principal advised to get over the fear of drawing teeth, since then he has practiced and is no longer afraid. “Face your demons.” Whatever you like least, practice drawing it to overcome this fear. He now teaches online. He notes he had the privilege to teach very great students, like Michael Talbot and Nattu in third form and 12 and 13 grade.
He tried to get them into figure drawing. He notes that figure drawing is downplayed in high school and realized this when he started teaching at UWI. Not a lot of attention is given to figure drawing in institutions . At his school he was always the figure drawing person. He states that there is always a figure drawing question on the CXC papers. His students tend to do that. If you can draw figures, you can draw still life.
Most teachers would be into object still life pieces. He equates drawing figure drawing as lifting ten pounds while still life is one pound. You can easily lift one pound. You can draw objects, landscape, buildings etc. It’s easier to achieve still life than figure drawing which is more complicated.
Rohans shares with each class he has of a particular student who had no clue what art was or what they were doing and continued to encourage him before school gave holiday. Upon school restarting, the student showed him some art work, showing great improvement and skills. Surprising Rohan and the student himself, he advised the student's father that his son pulled off an impossible task. He notes that you are able to draw before you can write. This he uses as a motivator for other students who don’t seem to show interest in art. He encourages them to try and repeat. Kevin adds that “repetition is the mother of skills” they say.
He ends up saying that he is still learning the trade, and it's a matter of getting there to create his own animation. He is building his foundation now and is able to draw faces out of his head. He paid lots of attention and practice in drawing real faces so that now he is able to draw faces from his imagination. He notes how the light affects the drawing, building the skeleton and soon will get to the muscles then cover it with skin.
Rohan wants to get into other types of animation, for example 3D animation. Rohan is not only gifted as a traditional and digital artist, but is also a writer and plays the guitar.
Link for interview:
Checkout more of his work below:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/24CaratGold
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seemssoeasy/?hl=en
TikTok: //www.tiktok.com/@seemssoeasy">https://www.tiktok.com/@seemssoeasy?
